University  of  California  •  Berkeley 

DAVID  E.  BELCH  COLLECTION  OF 
H.L.  MENCKEN 

GiftofVakrieD.  Bekh 


DAMN!   A  BOOK   OF   CALUMNY 


DAMN! 

A  BOOK  OF  CALUMNY 

BY  H.  L.  MENCKEN 


Second  Printing 


PHILIP    GOODMAN    COMPANY 
NEW  YORK   NINETEEN  EIGHTEEN 


COPYRIGHT  1918  BY 
PHILIP  GOODMAN  COMPANY 


CONTENTS 

I  Pater  Patrise  7 

II  The  Reward  of  the  Artist  9 

III  The  Heroic  Considered  10 

IV  The  Burden  of  Humor  11 
V  The  Saving  Grace  13 

VI  Moral  Indignation  14 

VII  Stable-Names  17 

VIII  The  Jews  19 

IX  The  Comstockian  Premiss  22 

X  The  Labial  Infamy  28 

XI  A  True  Ascetic  28 

XII  On  Lying  30 

XIH  History  32 

XIV  The  Curse  of  Civilization  34 

XV  Eugenics  35 

XVI  The  Jocose  Gods  37 

XVII  War  38 

XVIII  Moralist  and  Artist  39 

XIX.  Actors  40 

XX  The  Crowd  45 

XXI  An  American  Philosopher  48 

XXII  Clubs  49 

XXIII  Fidelis  ad  Urnum  50 

XXIV  A  Theological  Mystery  52 
XXV  The  Test  of  Truth  53 

XXVI  Literary  Indecencies  54 

XXVII  Virtuous  Vandalism  55 


XXVIII  A  Footnote  on  the  Duel  of 

Sex  60 

XXIX  Alcohol  64 

XXX  Thoughts  on  the  Voluptuous      67 

XXXI  The  Holy  Estate  69 

XXXII  Dichtung  und  Wahrheit  70 

XXXIII  Wild  Shots  71 

XXXIV  Beethoven  73 
XXXV  The  Tone  Art  75 

XXXVI  Zoos  80 

XXXVII  On  Hearing  Mozart  86 

XXXVIII  The  Road  to  Doubt  87 

XXXIX  A  New  Use  for  Churches  88 

XL  The  Root  of  Religion  90 

XLI  Free  Will  91 

XLII  Quid  est  Veritas?  95 

XLIII  The  Doubter's  Reward  96 

XLIV  Before  the  Altar  97 

XLV  The  Mask  98 

XL VI  Pia  Veneziani,  poi  Cristiani  99 

XL VII  Off  Again,  On  Again  101 

XLVIII  Theology  102 

XLIX  Exemplia  Gratia  103 


DAMN!    A  BOOK  OF  CALUMNY 

I. 
PATER  PATRICE 

If  George  Washington  were  alive  today,  what 
a  shining  mark  he  would  be  for  the  whole 
camorra  of  uplifters,  forward-lookers  and  pro- 
fessional patriots!  He  was  the  Rockefeller  of 
his  time,  the  richest  man  in  the  United  States, 
a  promoter  of  stock  companies,  a  land-grabber, 
an  exploiter  of  mines  and  timber.  He  was  a 
bitter  opponent  of  foreign  alliances,  and  de- 
nounced their  evils  in  harsh,  specific  terms.  He 
had  a  liking  for  all  fortright  and  pugnacious 
men,  and  a  contempt  for  lawyers,  schoolmasters 
and  all  other  such  obscurantists.  He  was  not 
pious.  He  drank  whisky  whenever  he  felt  chilly, 
and  kept  a  jug  of  it  handy.  He  knew  far  more 
profanity  than  Scripture,  and  used  and  enjoyed 
it  more.  He  had  no  belief  in  the  infallible  wis- 
dom of  the  common  people,  but  regarded  them 
as  inflammatory  dolts,  and  tried  to  save  the  re- 
public from  them.  He  advocated  no  sure  cure 
for  all  the  sorrows  of  the  world,  and  doubted 
that  such  a  panacea  existed.  He  took  no  inter- 
est in  the  private  morals  of  his  neighbors. 

Inhabiting  These  States  today,  George  would 
be  ineligible  for  any  office  of  honor  or  profit. 
The  Senate  would  never  dare  confirm  him;  the 
President  would  not  think  of  nominating  him. 


He  would  be  on  trial  in  all  the  yellow  journals 
for  belonging  to  the  Invisible  Government,  the 
Hell  Hounds  of  Plutocracy,  the  Money  Power, 
the  Interests.  The  Sherman  Act  would  have 
him  in  its  toils;  he  would  be  under  indictment 
by  every  grand  jury  south  of  the  Potomac;  the 
triumphant  prohibitionists  of  his  native  state 
would  be  denouncing  him  (he  had  a  still  at 
Mount  Vernon)  as  a  debaucher  of  youth,  a  re- 
cruiting officer  for  insane  asylums,  a  poisoner  of 
the  home.  The  suffragettes  would  be  on  his 
trail,  with  sentinels  posted  all  along  the  Acco- 
tink  road.  The  initiators  and  referendors  would 
be  bawling  for  his  blood.  The  young  college 
men  of  the  Nation  and  the  New  Republic  would 
be  lecturing  him  weekly.  He  would  be  used  to 
scare  children  in  Kansas  and  Arkansas.  The 
chautauquas  would  shiver  whenever  his  name 
was  mentioned.  .  .  . 

And  what  a  chance  there  would  be  for  that 
ambitious  young  district  attorney  who  thought 
to  shadow  him  on  his  peregrinations — and  grab 
him  under  the  Mann  Act ! 


II 

THE  REWARD  OF  THE  ARTIST 

A  man  labors  and  fumes  for  a  whole  year  to 
write  a  symphony  in  G  minor.  He  puts  enor- 
mous diligence  into  it,  and  much  talent,  and 
maybe  no  little  downright  genius.  It  draws  his 
blood  and  wrings  his  soul.  He  dies  in  it  that  he 
may  live  again.  .  .  .  Nevertheless,  its  final 
value,  in  the  open  market  of  the  world,  is  a 
great  deal  less  than  that  of  a  fur  overcoat,  half 
a  Rolls-Royce  automobile,  or  a  handful  of  au- 
thentic hair  from  the  whiskers  of  Henry  Wads- 
worth  Longfellow. 


Ill 


THE  HEROIC  CONSIDERED 

For  humility  and  poverty,  in  themselves,  the 
world  has  little  liking  and  less  respect.  In  the 
folk-lore  of  all  races,  despite  the  sentimentaliza- 
tion  of  abasement  for  dramatic  effect,  it  is  al- 
ways power  and  grandeur  that  count  in  the  end. 
The  whole  point  of  the  story  of  Cinderella,  the 
most  widely  and  constantly  charming  of  all 
stories,  is  that  the  Fairy  Prince  lifts  Cinderella 
above  her  cruel  sisters  and  stepmother,  and  so 
enables  her  to  lord  it  over  them.  The  same  idea 
underlies  practically  all  other  folk-stories:  the 
essence  of  each  of  them  is  to  be  found  in  the 
ultimate  triumph  and  exaltation  of  its  protago- 
nist. And  of  the  real  men  and  women  of  his- 
tory, the  most  venerated  and  evied  are  those 
whose  early  humiliations  were  but  preludes  to 
terminal  glories ;  for  example,  Lincoln,  Whit- 
tington,  Franklin,  Columbus,  Demosthenes, 
Frederick  the  Great,  Catherine,  Mary  of  Mag- 
dala,  Moses.  Even  the  Man  of  Sorrows,  cradled 
in  a  manger  and  done  to  death  between  two 
thieves,  is  seen,  as  we  part  from  Him  at  last,  in 
a  situation  of  stupendous  magnificence,  with 
infinite  power  in  His  hands.  Even  the  Beati- 
tudes, in  the  midst  of  their  eloquent  counselling 
of  renunciation,  give  it  unimaginable  splendor  as 
its  reward.  The  meek  shall  inherit — what?  The 
whole  earth!  And  the  poor  in  spirit?  They 
shall  sit  upon  the  right  hand  of  God !  .  .  . 


10 


IV 

THE  BURDEN  OF  HUMOR 

What  is  the  origin  of  the  prejudice  against 
humor?  Why  is  it  so  dangerous,  if  you  would 
keep  the  public  confidence,  to  make  the  public 
laugh  ?  Is  it  because  humor  and  sound  sense  are 
essentially  antagonistic?  Has  humanity  found 
by  experience  that  the  man  who  sees  the  fun  of 
life  is  unfitted  to  deal  sanely  with  its  problems  ? 
I  think  not.  No  man  had  more  of  the  comic 
spirit  in  him  than  William  Shakespeare,  and 
yet  his  serious  reflections,  by  the  sheer  force  of 
their  sublime  obviousness,  have  pushed  their  way 
into  the  race's  arsenal  of  immortal  platitudes. 
So,  too,  with  Aesop,  and  with  Balzac,  and  with 
Dickens,  to  come  down  the  scale.  All  of  these 
men  were  fundamentally  humorists,  and  yet  all 
of  them  achieved  what  the  race  has  come  to  ac- 
cept as  a  penetrating  sagacity.  Contrariwise, 
many  a  haloed  pundit  has  had  his  occasional 
guffaw.  Lincoln,  had  there  been  no  Civil  War, 
might  have  survived  in  history  chiefly  as  the 
father  of  the  American  smutty  story — the  only 
original  art-form  that  America  has  yet  contrib- 
uted to  literature.  Huxley,  had  he  not  been  the 
greatest  intellectual  duellist  of  his  age,  might 
have  been  its  greatest  satirist.  Bismarck,  pur- 
suing the  gruesome  trade  of  politics,  concealed 
the  devastating  wit  of  a  Moliere;  his  surviving 
epigrams  are  truly  stupendous.  And  Beethoven, 
after  soaring  to  the  heights  of  tragedy  in  the 
ii 


first  movement  of  the  Fifth  Symphony,  turned 
to  the  sardonic  bull-fiddling  of  the  scherzo. 

No,  there  is  not  the  slightest  disharmony  be- 
tween sense  and  nonsense,  humor  and  respecta- 
bility, despite  the  skittish  tendency  to  assume 
that  there  is.  But,  why,  then,  that  widespread 
error?  What  actual  fact  of  life  lies  behind  it, 
giving  it  a  specious  appearance  of  reasonable- 
ness? None  other,  I  am  convinced,  than  the 
fact  that  the  average  man  is  far  too  stupid  to 
make  a  joke.  He  may  see  a  joke  and  love  a 
joke,  particularly  when  it  floors  and  flabber- 
gasts some  person  he  dislikes,  but  the  only  way 
he  can  himself  take  part  in  the  priming  and 
pointing  of  a  new  one  is  by  acting  as  its  target. 
In  brief,  his  personal  contact  with  humor  tends 
to  fill  him  with  an  accumulated  sense  of  dis- 
advantage, of  pricked  complacency,  of  sudden 
and  crushing  defeat;  and  so,  by  an  easy  psy- 
chological process,  he  is  led  into  the  idea  that 
the  thing  itself  is  incompatible  with  true  dig- 
nity of  character  and  intellect.  Hence  his  deep 
suspicion  of  jokers,  however  adept  their 
thrusts.  "What  a  damned  fool!" — this  same 
half-pitying  tribute  he  pays  to  wit  and  butt 
alike.  He  cannot  separate  the  virtuoso  of  com- 
edy from  his  general  concept  of  comedy  itself, 
and  that  concept  is  inextricably  mingled  with 
memories  of  foul  ambuscades  and  mortifying 
hurts.  And  so  it  is  not  often  that  he  is  willing 
to  admit  any  wisdom  in  a  humorist,  or  to  con- 
done frivolity  in  a  sage. 

12 


V 
THE  SAVING  GRACE 

Let  us  not  burn  the  universities — yet.  After 
all,  the  damage  they  do  might  be  worse.  .  .  . 
Suppose  Oxford  had  snared  and  disemboweled 
Shakespeare!  Suppose  Harvard  had  set  its 
stamp  upon  Mark  Twain! 


VI 

MORAL  INDIGNATION 

The  loud,  preposterous  moral  crusades  that 
so  endlessly  rock  the  republic — against  the  rum 
demon,  against  Sunday  baseball,  against  Sun- 
day moving-pictures,  against  dancing,  against 
fornication,  against  the  cigarette,  against  all 
things  sinful  and  charming — ^these  astounding 
Methodist  jehads  offer  fat  clinical  material  to 
the  student  of  mobocracy.  In  the  long  run, 
nearly  all  of  them  must  succeed,  for  the  mob 
is  eternally  virtuous,  and  the  only  thing  neces- 
sary to  get  it  in  favor  of  some  new  and  super- 
oppressive  law  is  to  convince  it  that  that  law 
will  be  distasteful  to  the  minority  that  it  envies 
and  hates.  The  poor  numskull  who  is  so  hor- 
ribly harrowed  by  Puritan  pulpit-thumpers 
that  he  can't  go  to  a  ball  game  on  Sunday 
afternoon  without  dreaming  of  hell  and  the 
devil  all  Sunday  night  is  naturally  envious  of 
the  fellow  who  can,  and  being  envious  of  him, 
he  hates  him  and  is  eager  to  destroy  his  offen- 
sive happiness.  The  farmer  who  works  18 
hours  a  day  and  never  gets  a  day  off  is  envious 
of  his  farmhand  who  goes  to  the  crossroads  and 
barrels  up  on  Saturday  afternoon;  hence  the 
virulence  of  prohibition  among  the  peasantry. 
The  hard-working  householder  who,  on  some 
bitter  evening,  glances  over  the  Saturday  Even- 
ing Post  for  a  square  and  honest  look  at  his 


wife  is  envious  of  those  gaudy  drummers  who 
go  gallivanting  about  the  country  with  scarlet 
girls;  hence  the  Mann  act.  If  these  deviltries 
were  equally  open  to  all  men,  and  all  men  were 
equally  capable  of  appreciating  them,  their  un- 
popularity would  tend  to  wither. 

I  often  think,  indeed,  that  the  prohibitionist 
tub-thumpers  make  a  tactical  mistake  in  dwell- 
ing too  much  upon  the  evils  and  horrors  of  al- 
cohol, and  not  enough  upon  its  delights.  A 
few  enlarged  photographs  of  first-class  bar- 
rooms, showing  the  rows  of  well-fed,  well- 
dressed  bibuli  happily  moored  to  the  brass  rails, 
their  noses  in  fragrant  mint  and  hops  and  their 
hands  reaching  out  for  free  rations  of  olives, 
pretzels,  cloves,  pumpernickle,  Bismarck  her- 
ring, anchovies,  schwartenmagen,  wieners, 
Smithfield  ham  and  dill  pickles — such  a  gallery 
of  contentment  would  probably  do  far  more 
execution  among  the  dismal  shudra  than  all  the 
current  portraits  of  drunkards'  livers.  To  vote 
for  prohibition  in  the  face  of  the  liver  portraits 
means  to  vote  for  the  good  of  the  other  fellow, 
for  even  the  oldest  bibulomaniac  always  thinks 
that  he  himself  will  escape.  This  is  an  act  of 
altruism  almost  impossible  to  the  mob-man, 
whose  selfishness  is  but  little  corrupted  by  the 
imagination  that  shows  itself  in  his  betters.  His 
most  austere  renunciations  represent  no  more 
than  a  matching  of  the  joys  of  indulgence 
against  the  pains  of  hell;  religion,  to  him,  is 
little  more  than  synthesized  fear.  ...  I  ven- 


ture  that  many  a  vote  for  prohibition  comes 
from  gentlemen  who  look  longingly  through 
swinging  doors — and  pass  on  in  propitiation  of 
Satan  and  their  alert  consorts,  the  lake  of  brim- 
stone and  the  corrective  broomstick.  .  .  . 


16 


VII 


STABLE-NAMES 

Why  doesn't  some  patient  drudge  of  a  privat 
dozent  compile  a  dictionary  of  the  stable-names 
of  the  great?  All  show  dogs  and  race  horses,  as 
everyone  knows,  have  stable-names.  On  the  list 
of  entries  a  fast  mare  may  appear  as  Czarina 
Ogla  Fedorovna,  but  in  the  stable  she  is  not 
that  at  all,  nor  even  Czarina  or  Olga,  but  maybe 
Lil  or  Jennie.  And  a  prize  bulldog,  Champion 
Zoroaster  or  Charlemagne  XI.  on  the  bench, 
may  be  plain  Jack  or  Ponto  en  famitte.  So 
with  celebrities  of  the  genus  homo.  Huxley's 
official  style  and  appellation  was  "The  Right 
Hon.  Thomas  Henry  Huxley,  P.  C.,  M.  D., 
Ph.  D.,  LL.  D.,  D.  C.  L.,  D.  Sc.,  F.  R.  S.,"  and 
his  biographer  tells  us  that  he  delighted  in  its 
rolling  grandeur — but  to  his  wife  he  was  always 
Hal.  Shakespeare,  to  his  fellows  of  his  Bank- 
side,  was  Will,  and  perhaps  Willie  to  Ann  Hath- 
away. The  Kaiser  is  another  Willie:  the  late 
Czar  so  addressed  him  in  their  famous  exchange 
of  telegrams.  The  Czar  himself  was  Nicky  in 
those  days,  and  no  doubt  remains  Nicky  to  his 
intimates  today.  Edgar  Allan  Poe  was  always 
Eddie  to  his  wife,  and  Mark  Twain  was  always 
Youth  to  his.  P.  T.  Barnum's  stable-name  was 
Taylor,  his  middle  name;  Charles  Lamb's  was 
Guy;  Nietzsche's  was  Fritz;  Whistler's  was 
Jimmie;  the  late  King  Edward's  was  Bertie; 

17 


Grover  Cleveland's  was  Steve ;  J.  Pierpont  Mor- 
gan's was  Jack ;  Dr.  Wilson's  is  Tom. 

Some  given  names  are  surrounded  by  a  whole 
flotilla  of  stable-names.  Henry,  for  example,  is 
softened  variously  into  Harry,  Hen,  Hank,  Hal, 
Henny,  Enery,  On'ry  and  Heinie.  Which  did  Ann 
Boleyn  use  when  she  cooed  into  the  suspicious 
ear  of  Henry  VIII.  ?  To  which  did  Henrik  Ibsen 
answer  at  the  domestic  hearth?  It  is  difficult 
to  imagine  his  wife  calling  him  Henrik:  the 
name  is  harsh,  clumsy,  razor-edged.  But  did 
she  make  it  Hen  or  Rik,  or  neither?  What  was 
Bismarck  to  the  Fiirstin,  and  to  the  mother  he 
so  vastly  feared?  Ottchen?  Somehow  it  seems 
impossible.  What  was  Grant  to  his  wife  ?  Sure- 
ly not  Ulysses !  And  Wolfgang  Amadeus  Mo- 
zart? And  Rutherford  B.  Hayes?  Was  Robert 
Browning  ever  Bob?  Was  John  Wesley  ever 
Jack?  Was  Emmanuel  Swendenborg  ever 
Manny?  Was  Tadeusz  Kosciusko  ever  Teddy? 

A  fair  field  of  inquiry  invites.  Let  some  la- 
borious assistant  professor  explore  and  chart 
it.  There  will  be  more  of  human  nature  in  his 
report  than  in  all  the  novels  ever  written. 


18 


VIII 

THE  JEWS 

The  Jews,  like  the  Americans,  labor  under  a 
philosophical  dualism,  and  in  both  cases  it  is  a 
theological  heritage.  On  the  one  hand  there  is 
the  idealism  that  is  lovely  and  uplifting  and 
will  get  a  man  into  heaven,  and  on  the  other 
hand  there  is  the  realism  that  works.  The  fact 
that  the  Jews  cling  to  both,  thus  running,  as  it 
were,  upon  two  tracks,  is  what  makes  them  so 
puzzling,  now  and  then,  to  the  goyim.  In  one 
aspect  they  stand  for  the  most  savage  practi- 
cality ;  in  another  aspect  they  are  dreamers  of 
an  almost  fabulous  other-worldiness.  My  own 
belief  is  that  the  essential  Jew  is  the  idealist — 
that  his  occasional  flashing  of  hyena  teeth  is  no 
more  than  a  necessary  concession  to  the  harsh 
demands  of  the  struggle  for  existence.  Per- 
haps, in  many  cases,  it  is  due  to  an  actual  cor- 
ruption of  blood.  The  Jews  come  from  the 
Levant,  and  their  women  were  exposed  for  many 
centuries  to  the  admiration  of  Greek,  Arab  and 
Armenian.  The  shark  that  a  Jew  can  be  at 
his  worst  is  simply  a  Greek  or  Armenian  at 
his  best. 

As  a  statement  of  post-mortem  and  super- 
terrestrial  fact,  the  religion  that  the  Jews  have 
foisted  upon  the  world  seems  to  me  to  be  as 
vast  a  curse  as  the  influenza  that  we  inherit 
from  the  Tatars  or  the  democratic  fallacies  set 
afloat  by  the  French  Revolution.  The  one 

19 


thing  that  can  be  said  in  favor  of  it  is  that  it 
is  not  true,  and  yet  we  suffer  from  it  almost  as 
much  as  if  it  were  true.  But  with  it,  encasing 
it  and  preserving  it,  there  has  come  something 
that  is  positively  valuable — something,  indeed, 
that  is  beyond  all  price — and  that  is  Jewish 
poetry.  To  compare  it  to  the  poetry  of  any 
other  race  is  wholly  impossible;  it  stands  com- 
pletely above  all  the  rest ;  it  is  as  far  beyond  the 
next  best  as  German  music  is  beyond  French 
music,  or  French  painting  beyond  English 
painting,  or  the  English  drama  beyond  the  Ital- 
ian drama.  There  are  single  chapters  in  the 
Old  Testament  that  are  worth  all  the  poetry 
ever  written  in  the  New  World  and  nine-tenths 
of  that  written  in  the  Old.  The  Jews  of  those 
ancient  days  had  imagination,  they  had  dignity, 
they  had  ears  for  sweet  sound,  they  had,  above 
all,  the  faculty  of  grandeur.  The  stupendous 
music  that  issued  from  them  has  swept  their 
barbaric  demonology  along  with  it,  setting  at 
naught  the  collective  intelligence  of  the  human 
species ;  they  embalmed  their  idiotic  taboos  and 
fetishes  in  undying  strains,  and  so  gave  them 
some  measure  of  the  same  immortality.  A  race 
of  lawgivers?  Bosh!  Leviticus  is  as  archaic 
as  the  Code  of  Manu,  and  the  Decalogue  is  a 
fossil.  A  race  of  seers  ?  Bosh  again !  The  God 
they  saw  survives  only  as  a  bogey-man,  a  the- 
ory, an  uneasy  and  vexatious  ghost.  A  race  of 
traders  and  sharpers  ?  Bosh  a  third  time !  The 
Jews  are  as  poor  as  the  Spaniards.  But  a  race 

20 


of  poets,  my  lords,  a  race  of  poets!  It  is  a 
vision  of  beauty  that  has  ever  haunted  them. 
And  it  has  been  their  destiny  to  transmit  that 
vision,  enfeebled,  perhaps,  but  still  distinct,  to 
other  and  lesser  peoples,  that  life  might  be 
made  softer  for  the  sons  of  men,  and  the  good- 
ness of  the  Lord  God — whoever  He  may  be — 
might  not  be  forgotten. 


21 


IX 
THE  COMSTOCKIAN  PREMISS 

It  is  argued  against  certain  books,  by  virtu- 
osi of  moral  alarm,  that  they  depict  vice  as  at- 
tractive. This  recalls  the  king  who  hanged  a 
judge  for  deciding  that  an  archbishop  was  a 
mammal. 


22 


THE  LABIAL  INFAMY 

After  five  years  of  search  I  have  been  able 
to  discover  but  one  book  in  English  upon  the 
art  of  kissing,  and  that  is  a  very  feeble  treatise 
by  a  savant  of  York,  Pa.,  Dr.  R.  McCormick 
Sturgeon.  There  may  be  others,  but  I  have 
been  quite  unable  to  find  them.  Kissing,  for  all 
one  hears  of  it,  has  not  attracted  the  scientists 
and  literati ;  one  compares  its  meagre  literature 
with  the  endless  books  upon  the  other  phenom- 
ena of  love,  especially  divorce  and  obstetrics. 
Even  Dr.  Sturgeon,  pioneering  bravely,  is  un- 
able to  get  beyond  a  sentimental  and  trivial  view 
of  the  thing  he  vivisects,  and  so  his  book  is  no 
more  than  a  compendium  of  mush.  His  very  de- 
scription of  the  act  of  kissing  is  made  up  of 
sonorous  gabble  about  heaving  bosoms,  red  lips, 
electric  sparks  and  such-like  imaginings.  What 
reason  have  we  for  believing,  as  he  says,  that 
the  lungs  are  "strongly  expanded"  during  the 
act?  My  own  casual  observation  inclines  me  to 
hold  that  the  opposite  is  true,  that  the  lungs  are 
actually  collapsed  in  a  pseudo-asthmatic  spasm. 
Again,  what  is  the  ground  for  arguing  that  the 
lips  are  "full,  ripe  and  red?"  The  real  effect  of 
the  emotions  that  accompany  kissing  is  to 
empty  the  superficial  capillaries  and  so  produce 
a  leaden  pallor.  As  for  such  salient  symptoms 
as  the  temperature,  the  pulse  and  the  rate  of 
respiration,  the  learned  pundit  passes  them  over 

23 


without  a  word.  Mrs.  Elsie  Clews  Parsons  would 
be  a  good  one  to  write  a  sober  and  accurate 
treatise  upon  kissing.  Her  books  upon  "The 
Family"  and  "Fear  and  Conventionality"  indi- 
cate her  possession  of  the  right  sort  of  learning. 
Even  better  would  be  a  work  by  Havelock  Ellis, 
say,  in  three  or  four  volumes.  Ellis  has  devoted 
his  whole  life  to  illuminating  the  mysteries  of 
sex,  and  his  collection  of  materials  is  unsur- 
passed in  the  world.  Surely  there  must  be  an 
enormous  mass  of  instructive  stuff  about  kissing 
in  his  card  indexes,  letter  files,  book  presses  and 
archives. 

Just  why  the  kiss  as  we  know  it  should  have 
attained  to  its  present  popularity  in  Christen- 
dom is  probably  one  of  the  things  past  finding 
out.  The  Japanese,  a  very  affectionate  and 
sentimental  people,  do  not  practise  kissing  in 
any  form ;  they  regard  the  act,  in  fact,  with  an 
aversion  matching  our  own  aversion  to  the  rub- 
bing of  noses.  Nor  is  it  in  vogue  among  the 
Moslems,  nor  among  the  Chinese,  who  counte- 
nance it  only  as  between  mother  and  child.  Even 
in  parts  of  Christendom  it  is  girt  about  by  rigid 
taboos,  so  that  its  practise  tends  to  be  restrict- 
ed to  a  few  occasions.  Two  Frenchmen  or  Ital- 
ians, when  they  meet,  kiss  each  other  on  both 
cheeks.  One  used  to  see,  indeed,  many  pictures 
of  General  Joffre  thus  bussing  the  heroes  of 
Verdun;  there  even  appeared  in  print  a  story 
to  the  effect  that  one  of  them  objected  to  the 
scratching  of  his  moustache.  But  imagine  two 

24 


Englishmen!  kissing !  Or  two  Germans !  As 
well  imagined  the  former  kissing  the  latter !  Such 
a  display  of  affection  is  simply  impossible  to 
men  of  Northern  blood;  they  would  die  with 
shame  if  caught  at  it.  The  Englishman,  like 
the  American,  never  kisses  if  he  can  help  it.  He 
even  regards  it  as  bad  form  to  kiss  his  wife  in 
a  railway  station,  or,  in  fact,  anywhere  in  sight 
of  a  third  party.  The  Latin  has  no  such  com- 
punctions. He  leaps  to  the  business  regardless 
of  place  or  time;  his  sole  concern  is  with  the 
lady.  Once,  in  driving  from  Nice  to  Monte 
Carlo  along  the  lower  Corniche  road,  I  passed  a 
hundred  or  so  open  taxicabs  containing  man  and 
woman,  and  fully  75  per  cent,  of  the  men  had 
their  arms  around  their  companions,  and  were 
kissing  them.  These  were  not  peasants,  remem- 
ber, but  well-to-do  persons.  In  England  such 
a  scene  would  have  caused  a  great  scandal;  in 
most  American  States  the  police  would  have 
charged  the  offenders  with  drawn  revolvers. 

The  charm  of  kissing  is  one  of  the  things  I 
have  always  wondered  at.  I  do  not  pretend,  of 
course,  that  I  have  never  done  it;  mere  polite- 
ness forces  one  to  it ;  there  are  women  who  sulk 
and  grow  bellicose  unless  one  at  least  makes  the 
motions  of  kissing  them.  But  what  I  mean  is 
that  I  have  never  found  the  act  a  tenth  part  as 
agreeable  as  poets,  the  authors  of  musical  com- 
edy librettos,  and  (on  the  contrary  side)  chap- 
erones  and  the  gendarmerie  make  it  out.  The 
physical  sensation,  far  from  being  pleasant,  is 

25 


intensely  uncomfortable — the  suspension  of  res- 
piration, indeed,  quickly  resolves  itself  into  a 
feeling  of  suffocation — and  the  posture  necessi- 
tated by  the  approximation  of  lips  and  lips  is 
unfailingly  a  constrained  and  ungraceful  one. 
Theoretically,  a  man  kisses  a  woman  perpen- 
dicularly, with  their  eyes,  those  "windows  of 
the  soul,"  synchronizing  exactly.  But  actually, 
on  account  of  the  incompressibility  of  the  nasal 
cartilages,  he  has  to  incline  either  his  or  her 
head  to  an  angle  of  at  least  60  degrees,  and  the 
result  is  that  his  right  eye  gazes  insanely  at  the 
space  between  her  eyebrows,  while  his  left  eye  is 
fixed  upon  some  vague  spot  behind  her.  An  in- 
stantaneous photograph  of  such  a  maneuvre, 
taken  at  the  moment  of  incidence,  would  prob- 
ably turn  the  stomach  of  even  the  most  ro- 
mantic man,  and  force  him,  in  sheer  self-re- 
spect, to  renounce  kissing  as  he  has  renounced 
leap-frog  and  walking  on  stilts.  Only  a  wo- 
man (for  women  are  quite  devoid  of  aesthetic 
feeling)  could  survive  so  damning  a  picture. 

But  the  most  embarrassing  moment,  in  kiss- 
ing, does  not  come  during  the  actual  kiss  (for 
at  that  time  the  sensation  of  suffocation  drives 
out  all  purely  psychical  feelings),  but  imme- 
diately afterward.  What  is  one  to  say  to  the 
woman  then?  The  occasion  obviously  demands 
some  sort  of  remark.  One  has  just  received  (in 
theory)  ,  *-oon;  the  silence  begins  to 

make  itself  felt;  there  stands  the  fair  one,  ob- 
viously waiting.  Is  one  to  thank  her?  Cer- 

26 


tainly  that  would  be  too  transparent  a  piece 
of  hypocrisy,  too  flaccid  a  banality.  Is  one  to 
tell  her  that  one  loves  her?  Obviously,  there  is 
danger  in  such  assurances,  and  beside,  one 
usually  doesn't,  and  a  lie  is  a  lie.  Or  is  one 
to  descend  to  chatty  commonplaces — about  the 
weather,  literature,  politics,  the  war?  The 
practical  impossibility  of  solving  the  problem 
leads  almost  inevitably  to  a  blunder  far  worse 
than  any  merely  verbal  one:  one  kisses  her 
again,  and  then  again,  and  so  on,  and  so  on. 
The  ultimate  result  is  satiety,  repugnance,  dis- 
gust; even  the  girl  herself  gets  enough. 


XI 


A  TRUE  ASCETIC 

Herbert  Spencer's  objection  to  swearing,  of 
which  so  much  has  been  made  by  moralists,  was 
not  an  objection  to  its  sinfulness  but  an  ob- 
jection to  its  charm.  In  brief,  he  feared  com- 
fort, satisfaction,  joy.  The  boarding  houses 
in  which  he  dragged  out  his  gray  years  were  as 
bare  and  cheerless  as  so  many  piano  boxes.  He 
avoided  all  the  little  vices  and  dissipations 
which  make  human  existence  bearable:  good 
eating,  good  drinking,  dancing,  tobacco,  poker, 
poetry,  the  theatre,  personal  adornment,  philan- 
dering, adultery.  He  was  insanely  suspicious 
of  everything  that  threatened  to  interfere  with 
his  work.  Even  when  that  work  halted  him  by 
the  sheer  agony  of  its  monotony,  and  it  became 
necessary  for  him  to  find  recreation,  he  sought 
out  some  recreation  that  was  as  unattractive  as 
possible,  in  the  hope  that  it  would  quickly  drive 
him  back  to  work  again.  Having  to  choose  be- 
tween methods  of  locomotion  on  his  holidays,  he 
chose  going  afoot,  the  most  laborious  and  least 
satisfying  available.  Brought  to  bay  by  his  hu- 
man need  for  a  woman,  he  directed  his  fancy 
toward  George  Eliot,  probably  the  most  unap- 
petizing woman  of  his  race  and  time.  Drawn 
irresistibly  to  music,  he  avoided  the  Fifth  Sym- 
phony and  "Tristan  und  Isolde,"  and  joined  a 
crowd  of  old  maids  singing  part  songs  around  a 
cottage  piano.  John  Tyndall  saw  clearly  the 

28 


effect  of  all  this  and  protested  against  it,  say- 
ing, "He'd  be  a  much  nicer  fellow  if  he  had  a 
good  swear  now  and  then" — i.  e.,  if  he  let  go 
now  and  then,  if  he  yielded  to  his  healthy  hu- 
man instincts  now  and  then,  if  he  went  on  some 
sort  of  debauch  now  and  then.  But  what  Tyn- 
dall  overlooked  was  the  fact  that  the  meagreness 
of  his  recreations  was  the  very  element  that  at- 
tracted Spencer  to  them.  Obsessed  by  the  fear 
—and  it  turned  out  to  be  well-grounded — that 
he  would  not  live  long  enough  to  complete  his 
work,  he  regarded  all  joy  as  a  temptation,  a 
corruption,  a  sin  of  scarlet.  He  was  a  true 
ascetic.  He  could  sacrifice  all  things  of  the 
present  for  one  thing  of  the  future,  all  things 
real  for  one  thing  ideal. 


XII 

ON  LYING 

Lying  stands  on  a  different  plane  from  all 
other  moral  offenses,  not  because  it  is  intrinsi- 
cally more  heinous  or  less  heinous,  but  simply 
because  it  is  the  only  one  that  may  be  accu- 
rately measured.  Forgetting  unwitting  error, 
which  has  nothing  to  do  with  morals,  a  state- 
ment is  either  true  or  not  true.  This  is  a  sim- 
ple distinction  and  relatively  easy  to  establish. 
But  when  one  comes  to  other  derelictions  the 
thing  grows  more  complicated.  The  line  be- 
tween stealing  and  not  stealing  is  beautifully 
vague ;  whether  or  not  one  has  crossed  it  is  not 
determined  by  the  objective  act,  but  by  such 
delicate  things  as  motive  and  purpose.  So 
again,  with  assault,  sex  offenses,  and  even  mur- 
der; there  may  be  surrounding  circumstances 
which  greatly  condition  the  moral  quality  of  the 
actual  act.  But  lying  is  specific,  exact,  scien- 
tific. Its  capacity  for  precise  determination, 
indeed,  makes  its  presence  or  non-presence  the 
only  accurate  gauge  of  other  immoral  acts. 
Murder,  for  example,  is  nowhere  regarded  as 
immoral  save  it  involve  some  repudiation  of  a 
social  compact,  of  a  tacit  promise  to  refrain 
from  it — in  brief,  some  deceit,  some  perfidy, 
some  lie.  One  may  kill  freely  when  the  pact  is 
formally  broken,  as  in  war.  One  may  kill 
equally  freely  when  it  is  broken  by  the  victim, 
as  in  an  assault  by  a  highwayman.  But  one 

30 


may  not  kill  so  long  as  it  is  not  broken,  and 
one  may  not  break  it  to  clear  the  way.  Some 
form  of  lie  is  at  the  bottom  of  all  other  recog- 
nized crimes,  from  seduction  to  embezzlement. 
Curiously  enough,  this  master  immorality  of 
them  all  is  not  prohibited  by  the  Ten  Command- 
ments, nor  is  it  penalized,  in  its  pure  form,  by 
the  code  of  any  civilized  nation.  Only  savages 
have  laws  against  lying  per  se. 


xm 

HISTORY 

It  is  the  misfortune  of  humanity  that  its  his- 
tory is  chiefly  written  by  third-rate  men.  The 
first-rate  man  seldom  has  any  impulse  to  record 
and  philosophise;  his  impulse  is  to  act;  life,  to 
him,  is  an  adventure,  not  a  syllogism  or  an  au- 
topsy. Thus  the  writing  of  history  is  left  to 
college  professors,  moralists,  theorists,  dunder- 
heads. Few  historians,  great  or  small,  have 
shown  any  capacity  for  the  affairs  they  presume 
to  describe  and  interpret.  Gibbon  was  an  in- 
glorious failure  as  a  member  of  Parliament. 
Thycydides  made  such  a  mess  of  his  military 
(or,  rather,  naval)  command  that  he  was  exiled 
from  Athens  for  twenty  years  and  finally  assas- 
sinated. Flavius  Jusephus,  serving  as  governor 
of  Galilee,  lost  the  whole  province  to  the  Ro- 
mans, and  had  to  flee  for  his  life.  Momssen, 
elected  to  the  Prussian  Landtag,  flirted  with  the 
Socialists.  How  much  better  we  would  under- 
stand the  habits  and  nature  of  man  if  there 
were  more  historians  like  Julius  Caesar,  or  even 
like  Niccolo  Machiavelli!  Remembering  the 
sharp  and  devastating  character  of  their  rough 
notes,  think  what  marvelous  histories  Bismarck, 
Washington  and  Frederick  the  Great  might 
have  written !  Such  men  are  privy  to  the  facts ; 
the  usual  historians  have  to  depend  on  deduc- 
tions, rumors,  guesses.  Again,  such  men  know 

32 


how  to  tell  the  truth,  however  unpleasant ;  they 
are  wholly  free  of  that  puerile  moral  obsession 
which  marks  the  professor.  .  .  .  But  they  so 
seldom  tell  it !  Well,  perhaps  some  of  them  have 
— and  their  penalty  is  that  they  are  damned 
and  forgotten. 


33 


XIV 

THE  CURSE  OF  CIVILIZATION 

A  civilized  man's  worst  curse  is  social  obliga- 
tion. The  most  unpleasant  act  imaginable  is 
to  go  to  a  dinner  party.  One  could  get  far  bet- 
ter food,  taking  one  day  with  another,  at 
Childs',  or  even  in  a  Pennsylvania  Railroad  din- 
ing-car; one  could  find  far  more  amusing  so- 
ciety in  a  bar-room  or  a  bordello,  or  even  at  the 
Y.  M.  C.  A.  No  hostess  in  Christendom  ever 
arranged  a  dinner  party  of  any  pretentions 
without  including  at  least  one  intensely  dis- 
agreeable person — a  vain  and  vapid  girl,  a  hid- 
eous woman,  a  follower  of  baseball,  a  stock- 
broker, a  veteran  of  some  war.  or  other,  a  gab- 
bler of  politics.  And  one  is  enough  to  do  the 
business. 


34 


XV 


EUGENICS 

The  error  of  the  eugenists  lies  in  the  assump- 
tion that  a  physically  healthy  man  is  the  best 
fitted  to  survive.  This  is  true  of  rats  and  the 
pedicvlae,  but  not  of  the  higher  animals,  e.  g.9 
horses,  dogs  and  men.  In  these  higher  animals 
one  looks  for  more  subtle  qualities,  chiefly  of  the 
spirit.  Imagine  estimating  philosophers  by 
their  chest  expansions,  their  blood  pressures, 
their  Wassermann  reactions ! 

The  so-called  social  diseases,  over  which  eu- 
genists raise  such  a  pother,  are  surely  not  the 
worst  curses  that  mankind  has  to  bear.  Some 
of  the  greatest  men  in  history  have  had  them; 
whole  nations  have  had  them  and  survived.  The 
truth  about  them  is  that,  save  in  relatively  rare 
cases,  they  do  very  little  damage.  The  horror 
in  which  they  are  held  is  chiefly  a  moral  horror, 
and  its  roots  lie  in  the  assumption  that  they 
cannot  be  contracted  without  sin.  Nothing 
could  be  more  false.  Many  great  moralists  have 
suffered  from  them:  the  gods  are  always  up  to 
such  sardonic  waggeries. 

Moreover,  only  one  of  them  is  actually  inher- 
itable, and  that  one  is  transmitted  relatively  sel- 
dom. But  among  psychic  characters  one  finds 
that  practically  all  are  inheritable.  For  exam- 
ple, stupidity,  credulity,  avarice,  pecksniffery, 
lack  of  imagination,  hatred  of  beauty,  mean- 
ness, poltroonry,  petty  brutality,  smallness  of 

35 


soul.  ...  I  here  present,  of  course,  the  Puritan 
complex;  there  flashes  up  the  image  of  the 
"good  man,"  that  libel  on  God  and  the  devil. 
Consider  him  well.  If  you  had  to  choose  a  sire 
for  a  first-rate  son,  would  you  choose  a  con- 
sumptive Jew  with  the  fires  of  eternity  in  his 
eyes,  or  an  Iowa  right-thinker  with  his  hold  full 
of  Bibles  and  breakfast  food? 


XVI 

THE  JOCOSE  GODS 

What  humor  could  be  wilder  than  that  of  life 
itself?  Franz  Schubert,  on  his  deathbed,  read 
the  complete  works  of  J.  Fenimore  Cooper. 
John  Millington  Synge  wrote  "Riders  to  the 
Sea"  on  a  second-hand  $40  typewriter,  and 
wore  a  celluloid  collar.  Richard  Wagner  made 
a  living,  during  four  lean  years,  arranging  Ital- 
ian opera  arias  for  the  cornet.  Herbert  Spen- 
cer sang  bass  in  a  barber-shop  quartette  and 
was  in  love  with  George  Eliot.  William  Shake- 
speare was  a  social  pusher  and  bought  him  a 
bogus  coat-of-arms.  Martin  Luther  suffered 
from  the  jim-jams.  One  of  the  greatest  soldiers 
in  Hungarian  history  was  named  Hunjadi 
Janos.  , 


XVII 

WAR 

Superficially,  war  seems  inordinately  cruel 
and  and  wasteful,  and  yet  it  must  be  plain  on 
reflection  that  the  natural  evolutionary  process 
is  quite  as  cruel  and  even  more  wasteful.  Man's 
chief  efforts  in  times  of  peace  are  devoted  to 
making  that  process  less  violent  and  sanguinary. 
Civilization,  indeed,  may  be  defined  as  a  con- 
structive criticism  of  nature,  and  Huxley  even 
called  it  a  conspiracy  against  nature.  Man 
tries  to  remedy  what  must  inevitably  seem  the 
mistakes  and  to  check  what  must  inevitably 
seem  the  wanton  cruelty  of  the  Creator.  In  war 
man  abandons  these  efforts,  and  so  becomes 
more  jovian.  The  Greeks  never  represented  the 
inhabitants  of  Olympus  as  succoring  and  pro- 
tecting one  another,  but  always  as  fighting  and 
attempting  to  destroy  one  another. 

No  form  of  death  inflicted  by  war  is  one-half 
so  cruel  as  certain  forms  of  death  that  are  seen 
in  hospitals  every  day.  Besides,  these  forms  of 
death  have  the  further  disadvantage  of  being  in- 
glorious. The  average  man,  dying  in  bed,  not 
only  has  to  stand  the  pains  and  terrors  of 
death ;  he  must  also,  if  he  can  bring  himself  to 
think  of  it  at  all,  stand  the  notion  that  he  is 
ridiculous.  .  .  .  The  soldier  is  at  least  not 
laughed  at.  Even  his  enemies  treat  his  agonies 
with  respect. 


XVIII 

MORALIST  AND  ARTIST 

I  dredge  up  the  following  from  an  essay  on 
George  Bernard  Shaw  by  Robert  Blatchford, 
the  English  Socialist :  "Shaw  is  something  much 
better  than  a  wit,  much  better  than  an  artist, 
much  better  than  a  politician  or  a  dramatist; 
he  is  a  moralist,  a  teacher  of  ethics,  austere,  re- 
lentless, fiercely  earnest." 

What  could  be  more  idiotic?  Then  Cotton 
Mather  was  a  greater  man  than  Johann  Sebas- 
tian Bach.  Then  the  average  college  critic  of 
the  arts,  with  his  balderdash  about  inspiration 
and  moral  purpose,  is  greater  than  Georg 
Brandes  or  Saint-Beuve.  Then  Eugene  Brieux, 
with  his  Y.  M.  C.  A.  platitudinizing,  is  greater 
than  Moliere,  with  his  ethical  agnosticism,  his 
ironical  determinism. 

This  childish  respect  for  moralizing  runs 
through  the  whole  of  contemporary  criticism — 
at  least  in  England  and  America.  Blatchford 
differs  from  the  professorial  critics  only  in  the 
detail  that  he  can  actually  write.  What  he  says 
about  Shaw  has  been  said,  in  heavy  and  suffocat- 
ing words,  by  almost  all  of  them.  And  yet 
nothing  could  be  more  untrue.  The  moralist,  at 
his  best,  can  never  be  anything  save  a  sort  of 
journalist.  Moral  values  change  too  often  to 
have  any  serious  validity  or  interest ;  what  is  a 
virtue  today  is  a  sin  tomorrow.  But  the  man 
who  creates  a  thing  of  beauty  creates  something 
that  lasts. 

39 


XIX 

ACTORS 

"In  France  they  call  an  actor  a  m'as-tu-vu, 
which,  anglicised,  means  a  have-you-seen-me  ? 
.  .  .  The  average  actor  holds  the  mirror  up  to 
nature  and  sees  in  it  only  the  reflection  of  him- 
self." I  take  the  words  from  a  late  book  on  the 
so-called  art  of  the  mime  by .  the  editor  of  a 
magazine  devoted  to  the  stage.  The  learned  au- 
thor evades  plumbing  the  psychological  springs 
of  this  astounding  and  almost  invariable  vanity, 
this  endless  bumptiousness  of  the  cabotin  in  all 
climes  and  all  ages.  His  one  attempt  is  banal: 
"a  foolish  public  makes  much  of  him."  With  all 
due  respect,  Nonsense !  The  larval  actor  is  full 
of  hot  and  rancid  gases  long  before  a  foolish 
public  has  had  a  fair  chance  to  make  anything 
of  him  at  all,  and  he  continues  to  emit  them  long 
after  it  has  tried  him,  condemned  him  and  bid- 
den him  be  damned.  There  is,  indeed,  little 
choice  in  the  virulence  of  their  self-respect  be- 
tween a  Broadway  star  who  is  slobbered  over  by 
press  agents  and  fat  women,  and  the  poor  ham 
who  plays  thinking  parts  in  a  No.  7  road  com- 
pany. The  two  are  alike  charged  to  the  limit; 
one  more  ohm,  or  molecule,  and  they  would 
burst.  Actors  begin  where  militia  colonels,  Fifth 
avenue  rectors  and  Chautauqua  orators  leave 
off.  The  most  modest  of  them  (barring,  per- 
haps, a  few  unearthly  traitors  to  the  craft) 
matches  the  conceit  of  the  solitary  pretty  girl 

40 


on  a  slow  ship.  In  their  lofty  eminence  of  pom- 
posity they  are  challenged  only  by  Anglican 
bishops  and  grand  opera  tenors.  I  have  spoken 
of  the  danger  they  run  of  bursting.  In  the  case 
of  tenors  it  must  sometimes  actually  happen; 
even  the  least  of  them  swells  visibly  as  he  sings, 
and  permanently  as  he  grows  older.  .  .  . 

But  why  are  actors,  in  general,  such  blatant 
and  obnoxious  asses,  such  arrant  posturers  and 
wind-bags  ?  Why  is  it  as  surprising  to  find  an 
unassuming  and  likable  fellow  among  them  as  to 
find  a  Greek  without  fleas  ?  The  answer  is  quite 
simple.  To  reach  it  one  needs  but  consider  the 
type  of  young  man  who  normally  gets  stage- 
struck.  Is  he,  taking  averages,  the  intelligent, 
alert,  ingenious,  ambitious  young  fellow?  Is  he 
the  young  fellow  with  ideas  in  him,  and  a  yearn- 
ing for  hard  and  difficult  work?  Is  he  the  dili- 
gent reader,  the  hard  student,  the  eager  inquir- 
er? No.  He  is,  in  the  overwhelming  main,  the 
neighborhood  fop  and  beau,  the  human  clothes- 
horse,  the  nimble  squire  of  dames.  The  youths 
of  more  active  mind,  emerging  from  adolescence, 
turn  to  business  and  the  professions ;  the  men 
that  they  admire  and  seek  to  follow  are  men  of 
genuine  distinction,  men  who  have  actually  done 
difficult  and  valuable  things,  men  who  have 
fought  good  (if  often  dishonest)  fights  and  are 
respected  and  envied  by  other  men.  The  stage- 
struck  youth  is  of  a  softer  and  more  shallow 
sort.  He  seeks,  not  a  chance  to  test  his  mettle 
by  hard  and  useful  work,  but  an  easy  chance  to 


shine.  He  craves  the  regard,  not  of  men,  but  of 
women.  He  is,  in  brief,  a  hollow  and  incompe- 
tent creature,  a  strutter  and  poseur,  a  popin- 
jay, a  pretty  one.  .  .  . 

I  thus  beg  the  question,  but  explain  the 
actor.  He  is  this  silly  youngster  grown  older, 
but  otherwise  unchanged.  An  initiate  of  a  pro- 
fession requiring  little  more  information,  cul- 
ture or  capacity  for  ratiocination  than  that  of 
the  lady  of  joy,  and  surrounded  in  his  work- 
shop by  men  who  are  as  stupid,  as  vain  and  as 
empty  as  he  himself  will  be  in  the  years  to  come, 
he  suffers  an  arrest  of  development,  and  the  lit- 
tle intelligence  that  may  happen  to  be  in  him 
gets  no  chance  to  show  itself.  The  result,  in  its 
usual  manifestation,  is  the  average  bad  actor — 
a  man  with  the  cerebrum  of  a  floor-walker  and 
the  vanity  of  a  fashionable  clergyman.  The  re- 
sult, in  its  highest  and  holiest  form  is  the 
actor-manager,  with  his  retinue  of  press-agents, 
parasites  and  worshipping  wenches — perhaps 
the  most  preposterous  and  awe-inspiring  donkey 
that  civilization  has  yet  produced.  To  look  for 
sense  in  a  fellow  of  such  equipment  and  such  a 
history  would  be  like  looking  for  serviettes  in  a 
sailors'  boarding-house. 

By  the  same  token,  the  relatively  greater  in- 
telligence of  actresses  is  explained.  They  are, 
at  their  worst,  quite  as  bad  as  the  generality  of 
actors.  There  are  she-stars  who  are  all  tem- 
perament and  balderdash — intellectually  speak- 
ing, beggars  on  horseback,  servant  girls  well 

42 


washed.  But  no  one  who  knows  anything  about 
the  stage  need  be  told  that  it  can  show  a  great 
many  more  quick-minded  and  self-respecting 
women  than  intelligent  men.  And  why?  Sim- 
ply because  its  women  are  recruited,  in  the 
main,  from  a  class  much  above  that  which  fur- 
nishes its  men.  It  is,  after  all,  not  unnatural 
for  a  woman  of  considerable  intelligence  to  as- 
pire to  the  stage.  It  offers  her,  indeed,  one  of 
the  most  tempting  careers  that  is  open  to  her. 
She  cannot  hope  to  succeed  in  business,  and  in 
the  other  professions  she  is  an  unwelcome  and 
much-scoff ed-at  intruder,  but  on  the  boards  she 
can  meet  men  on  an  equal  footing.  It  is,  there- 
fore, no  wonder  that  women  of  a  relatively  su- 
perior class  often  take  to  the  business.  .  . 
Once  they  embrace  it,  their  superiority  to  their 
male  colleagues  is  quickly  manifest.  All  move- 
ments against  puerility  and  imbecility  in  the 
drama  have  originated,  not  with  actors,  but 
with  actresses — :that  is,  in  so  far  as  they  have 
originated  among  stage  folks  at  all.  The  Ib- 
sen pioneers  were  such  women  as  Helena  Mod- 
jeska,  Agnes  Sorma  and  Janet  Achurch;  the 
men  all  hung  back.  Ibsen,  it  would  appear, 
was  aware  of  this  superior  alertness  and  took 
shrewd  advantage  of  it.  At  all  events,  his  most 
tempting  acting  parts  are  feminine  ones. 

The  girls  of  the  stage  demonstrate  this  ten- 
dency against  great  difficulties.  They  have  to 
carry  a  heavy  handicap  in  the  enormous  num- 
ber of  women  who  seek  the  footlights  merely 

43 


to  advertise  their  real  profession,  but  despite 
all  this,  anyone  who  has  the  slightest  acquaint- 
ance with  stagefolk  will  testify  that,  taking  one 
with  another,  the  women  have  vastly  more 
brains  than  the  men  and  are  appreciably  less 
vain  and  idiotic.  Relatively  few  actresses  of 
any  rank  marry  actors.  They  find  close  com- 
munion with  the  strutting  brethren  psycholog- 
ically impossible.  Stock-brokers,  dramatists 
and  even  theatrical  managers  are  greatly  to  be 
preferred. 


A  A 


XX 

THE  CROWD 

Gustave  Le  Bon  and  his  school,  in  their  dis- 
cussions of  the  psychology  of  crowds,  have  put 
forward  the  doctrine  that  the  individual  man, 
cheek  by  jowl  with  the  multitude,  drops  down 
an  intellectual  peg  or  two,  and  so  tends  to  show 
the  mental  and  emotional  reactions  of  his  in- 
feriors. It  is  thus  that  they  explain  the  well- 
known  violence  and  imbecility  of  crowds.  The 
crowd,  as  a  crowd,  performs  acts  that  many  of 
its  members,  as  individuals,  would  never  be 
guilty  of.  Its  average  intelligence  is  very  low; 
it  is  inflammatory,  vicious,  idiotic,  almost  sim- 
ian. Crowds,  properly  worked  up  by  skilful 
demagogues,  are  ready  to  believe  anything,  and 
to  do  anything. 

Le  Bon,  I  daresay,  is  partly  right,  but  also 
partly  wrong.  His  theory  is  probably  too  flat- 
tering to  the  average  numskull.  He  accounts 
for  the  extravagance  of  crowds  on  the  assump- 
tion that  the  numskull,  along  with  the  superior 
man,  is  knocked  out  of  his  wits  by  suggestion — 
that  he,  too,  does  things  in  association  that  he 
would  never  think  of  doing  singly.  The  fact 
may  be  accepted,  but  the  reasoning  raises  a 
doubt.  The  numskull  runs  amuck  in  a  crowd, 
not  because  he  has  been  inoculated  with  new 
rascality  by  the  mysterious  crowd  influence, 
but  because  his  habitual  rascality  now  has  its 
only  chance  to  function  safely.  In  other  words, 


the  numskull  is  vicious,  but  a  poltroon.  He  re- 
frains from  all  attempts  at  lynching  a  cappella, 
not  because  it  takes  suggestion  to  make  him 
desire  to  lynch,  but  because  it  takes  the  pro- 
tection of  a  crowd  to  make  him  brave  enough  to 
try  it. 

What  happens  when  a  crowd  cuts  loose  is  not 
quite  what  Le  Bon  and  his  followers  describe. 
The  few  superior  men  in  it  are  not  straightway 
reduced  to  the  level  of  the  underlying  stone- 
heads.  On  the  contrary,  they  usually  keep 
their  heads,  and  often  make  efforts  to  combat 
the  crowd  action.  But  the  stoneheads  are  too 
many  for  them;  the  fence  is  torn  down  or 
the  blackamoor  is  lynched.  And  why?  Not 
because  the  stoneheads,  normally  virtuous,  are 
suddenly  criminally  insane.  Nay,  but  because 
they  are  suddenly  conscious  of  the  power  lying 
in  their  numbers — because  they  suddenly  real- 
ize that  their  natural  viciousness  and  insanity 
may  be  safely  permitted  to  function. 

In  other  words,  the  particular  swinishness  of 
a  crowd  is  permanently  resident  in  the  major- 
ity of  its  members — in  all  those  members,  that 
is,  who  are  naturally  ignorant  and  vicious — 
perhaps  95  per  cent.  All  studies  of  mob  psy- 
chology are  defective  in  that  they  underesti- 
mate this  viciousness.  They  are  poisoned  by 
the  prevailing  delusion  that  the  lower  orders 
of  men  are  angels.  This  is  nonsense.  The 
lower  orders  of  men  are  incurable  rascals,  either 
individually  or  collectively.  Decency,  self-re- 


straint,  the  sense  of  justice,  courage — these 
virtues  belong  only  to  a  small  minority  of  men. 
This  minority  never  runs  amuck.  Its  most  dis- 
tinguishing character,  in  truth,  is  its  resistance 
to  all  running  amuck.  The  third-rate  man, 
though  he  may  wear  the  false  whiskers  of  a 
first-rate  man,  may  always  be  detected  by  his 
inability  to  keep  his  head  in  the  face  of  an  ap- 
peal to  his  emotions.  A  whoop  strips  off  his 
disguise. 


XXI 

AN  AMERICAN  PHILOSOPHER 

As  for  William  Jennings  Bryan,  of  whom  so 
much  piffle,  pro  and  con,  has  been  written,  the 
whole  of  his  political  philosophy  may  be  re- 
duced to  two  propositions,  neither  of  which  is 
true.  The  first  is  the  proposition  that  the  com- 
mon people  are  wise  and  honest,  and  the  sec- 
ond is  the  proposition  that  all  persons  who 
refuse  to  believe  it  are  scoundrels.  Take  away 
the  two,  and  all  that  would  remain  of  Jennings 
would  be  a  somewhat  greasy  bald-headed  man 
with  his  mouth  open. 


XXII 

CLUBS 

Men's  clubs  have  but  one  intelligible  pur- 
pose: to  afford  asylum  to  fellows  who  haven't 
any  girls.  Hence  their  general  gloom,  their  air 
of  lost  causes,  their  prevailing  acrimony.  No 
man  would  ever  enter  a  club  if  he  had  an  agree- 
able woman  to  talk  to.  This  is  particularly 
true  of  married  men.  Those  of  them  that  one 
finds  in  clubs  answer  to  a  general  description: 
they  have  wives  too  unattractive  to  entertain 
them,  and  yet  too  watchful  to  allow  them  to 
seek  entertainment  elsewhere.  The  bachelors, 
in  the  main,  belong  to  two  classes:  (a)  those 
who  have  been  unfortunate  in  amour,  and  are 
still  too  sore  to  show  any  new  enterprise,  and 
(b)  those  so  lacking  in  charm  that  no  woman 
will  pay  any  attention  to  them.  Is  it  any  won- 
der that  the  men  one  thus  encounters  in  clubs 
are  stupid  and  miserable  creatures,  and  that 
they  find  their  pleasure  in  such  banal  sports  as 
playing  cards,  drinking  highballs,  shooting 
pool,  and  reading  the  barber-shop  weeklies? 
.  .  .  The  day  a  man's  mistress  is  married  one 
always  finds  him  at  his  club. 


XXIII. 

FIDELIS  AD  URNUM 

Despite  the  common  belief  of  women  to  the 
contrary,  fully  95  per  cent,  of  all  married 
men,  at  least  in  America,  are  faithful  to  their 
wives.  This,  however,  is  not  due  to  virtue,  but 
chiefly  to  lack  of  courage.  It  takes  more  in- 
itiative and  daring  to  start  up  an  extra-legal 
affair  than  most  men  are  capable  of.  They 
look  and  they  make  plans,  but  that  is  as  far  as 
they  get.  Another  salient  cause  of  connubial 
rectitude  is  lack  of  means.  A  mistress  costs  a 
great  deal  more  than  a  wife;  in  the  open  mar- 
ket of  the  world  she  can  get  more.  It  is  only 
the  rare  man  who  can  conceal  enough  of  his 
income  from  his  wife  to  pay  for  a  morganatic 
affair.  And  most  of  the  men  clever  enough  to 
do  this  are  too  clever  to  be  intrigued. 

I  have  said  that  95  per  cent,  of  married  men 
are  faithful.  I  believe  the  real  proportion  is 
nearer  99  per  cent.  What  women  mistake  for 
infidelity  is  usually  no  more  than  vanity.  Every 
man  likes  to  be  regarded  as  a  devil  of  a  fel- 
low, and  particularly  by  his  wife.  On  the  one 
hand,  it  diverts  her  attention  from  his  more 
genuine  shortcomings,  and  on  the  other  hand  it 
increases  her  respect  for  him.  Moreover,  it 
gives  her  a  chance  to  win  the  sympathy  of 
other  women,  and  so  satisfies  that  craving  for 

50 


martyrdom  which  is  perhaps  woman's  strongest 
characteristic.  A  woman  who  never  has  any 
chance  to  suspect  her  husband  feels  cheated 
and  humiliated.  She  is  in  the  position  of  those 
patriots  who  are  induced  to  enlist  for  a  war 
by  pictures  of  cavalry  charges,  and  then  find 
themselves  told  off  to  wash  the  general's  under- 
wear. 


XXIV 

A  THEOLOGICAL  MYSTERY 

The  moral  order  of  the  world  runs  aground 
on  hay  fever.  Of  what  use  is  it?  Why  was  it 
invented?  Cancer  and  hydrophobia,  at  least, 
may  be  defended  on  the  ground  that  they  kill. 
Killing  may  have  some  benign  purpose,  some 
esoteric  significance,  some  cosmic  use.  But  hay 
fever  never  kills;  it  merely  tortures.  No  man 
ever  died  of  it.  Is  the  torture,  then,  an  end  in 
itself?  Does  it  break  the  pride  of  strutting, 
snorting  man,  and  turn  his  heart  to  the  things 
of  the  spirit?  Nonsense!  A  man  with  hay 
fever  is  a  natural  criminal.  He  curses  the  gods, 
and  defies  them  to  kill  him.  He  even  curses  the 
devil.  Is  its  use,  then,  to  prepare  him  for  hap- 
piness to  come — for  the  vast  ease  and  comfort 
of  convalescence?  Nonsense  again!  The  one 
thing  he  is  sure  of,  the  one  thing  he  never 
forgets  for  a  moment,  is  that  it  will  come  back 
again  next  year. 


XXV 

THE  TEST  OF  TRUTH 

The  final  test  of  truth  is  ridicule.  Very  few 
religious  dogmas  have  ever  faced  it  and  sur- 
vived. Huxley  laughed  the  devils  out  of  the 
Gadarene  swine.  Dowie's  whiskers  broke  the 
back  of  Dowieism.  Not  the  laws  of  the  United 
States  but  the  mother-in-law  joke  brought  the 
Mormons  to  compromise  and  surrender.  Not 
the  horror  of  it  but  the  absurdity  of  it  killed 
the  doctrine  of  infant  damnation.  .  .  .  But  the 
razor  edge  of  ridicule  is  turned  by  the  tough 
hide  of  truth.  How  loudly  the  barber-surgeons 
laughed  at  Harvey — and  how  vainly !  What 
clown  ever  brought  down  the  house  like  Galileo  ? 
Or  Columbus?  Or  Jenner?  Or  Lincoln?  Or 
Darwin?  .  .  .  They  are  laughing  at  Nietzsche 
yet.  .  .  . 


XXVI 
LITERARY  INDECENCIES 

The  low,  graceless  humor  of  names !  On  my 
shelf  of  poetry,  arranged  by  the  alphabet,  Col- 
eridge and  J.  Gordon  Cooglar  are  next-door 
neighbors!  Mrs.  Hemans  is  beside  Laurence 
Hope!  Walt  Whitman  rubs  elbows  with  Ella 
Wheeler  Wilcox;  Robert  Browning  with  Rich- 
ard Burton;  Rossetti  with  Cale  Young  Rice; 
Shelly  with  Clinton  Scollard ;  Wordsworth  with 
George  E.  Woodberry;  John  Keats  with  Her- 
bert Kaufman ! 

Ibsen,  on  the  shelf  of  dramatists,  is  between 
Victor  Hugo  and  Jerome  K.  Jerome.  Suder- 
mann  follows  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe.  Maeter- 
linck shoulders  Percy  Mackaye.  Shakespeare 
is  between  Sardou  and  Shaw.  Euripides  and 
Clyde  Fitch!  Upton  Sinclair  and  Sophocles! 
Aeschylus  and  F.  Anstey!  D'Annunzio  and 
Richard  Harding  Davis!  Augustus  Thomas 
and  Tolstoi ! 

More  alphabetical  humor.  Gerhart  Haupt- 
mann  and  Robert  Hichens ;  Voltaire  and  Henry 
Van  Dyke ;  Flaubert  and  John  Fox,  Jr. ;  Balzac 
and  John  Kendrick  Bangs;  Ostrovsky  and  E. 
Phillips  Oppenheim ;  Elinor  Glyn  and  Theophile 
Gautier ;  Joseph  Conrad  and  Robert  W.  Cham- 
bers ;  Zola  and  Zangwill !  .  .  . 

Midway  on  my  scant  shelf  of  novels,  between 
George  Moore  and  Frank  Norris,  there  is  just 
room  enough  for  the  two  volumes  of  "Derring- 
ford,"  by  Frank  A.  Munsey. 

54 


XXVII 

VIRTUOUS  VANDALISM 

A  hearing  of  Schumann's  B  flat  symphony 
of  late,  otherwise  a  very  caressing  experience, 
was  corrupted  by  the  thought  that  music  would 
Jbe  much  the  gainer  if  musicians  could  get  over 
their  superstitious  reverence  for  the  mere  text 
of  the  musical  classics.  That  reverence,  indeed, 
is  already  subject  to  certain  limitations;  hands 
have  been  laid,  at  one  time  or  another,  upon 
most  of  the  immortal  oratorios,  and  even  the 
awful  name  of  Bach  has  not  dissuaded  certain 
German  editors.  But  it  still  swathes  the  stand- 
ard symphonies  like  some  vast  armor  of  rubber 
and  angel  food,  and  so  imagination  has  to 
come  to  the  aid  of  the  flutes  and  fiddles  when 
the  band  plays  Schumann,  Mozart,  and  even 
parts  of  Beethoven.  One  discerns,  often  quite 
clearly,  what  the  reverend  Master  was  aiming 
at,  but  just  as  often  one  fails  to  hear  it  in 
precise  tones. 

This  is  particularly  true  of  Schumann,  whose 
deficiency  in  instrumental  cunning  has  passed 
into  proverb.  And  in  the  B  flat  symphony,  his 
first  venture  into  the  epic  form,  his  failures  are 
most  numerous.  More  than  once,  obviously  at- 
tempting to  roll  up  tone  into  a  moving  climax, 
he  succeeds  only  in  muddling  his  colors.  I  re- 
member one  place — at  the  moment  I  can't  recall 
where  it  is — where  the  strings  and  the  brass 
storm  at  one  another  in  furious  figures.  The 

55 


blast  of  the  brass,  as  the  vaudevillains  say,  gets 
across — but  the  fiddles  merely  scream  absurdly. 
The  whole  passage  suggests  the  bleating  of 
sheep  in  the  midst  of  a  vast  bellowing  of  bulls. 
Schumann  overestimated  the  horsepower  of  fid- 
dle music  so  far  up  the  E  string — or  under- 
estimated the  full  kick  of  the  trumpets.  .  .  . 
Other  such  soft  spots  are  well  known. 

Why,  then,  go  on  parroting  gaucheries  that 
Schumann  himself,  were  he  alive  today,  would 
have  long  since  corrected?  Why  not  call  an 
ecumenical  council,  appoint  a  commission  to  see 
to  such  things,  and  then  forget  the  sacrilege? 
As  a  self-elected  delegate  from  heathendom,  I 
nominate  Dr.  Richard  Strauss  as  chairman. 
When  all  is  said  and  done,  Strauss  probably 
knows  more  about  writing  for  orchestra  than 
any  other  two  men  that  ever  lived,  not  exclud- 
ing Wagner.  Surely  no  living  rival,  as  Dr. 
Sunday  would  say,  has  anything  on  him.  If, 
after  hearing  a  new  composition  by  Strauss, 
one  turns  to  the  music,  one  is  invariably  sur- 
prised to  find  how  simple  it  is.  The  perform- 
ance reveals  so  many  purple  moments,  so  stag- 
gering an  array  of  lusciousness,  that  the  ear  is 
bemused  into  detecting  scales  and  chords  that 
never  were  on  land  or  sea.  WTiat  the  explora- 
tory eye  subsequently  discovers,  perhaps,  is  no 
more  than  our  stout  and  comfortable  old  friend, 
the  highly  well-born  hausfrau,  Mme.  C  Dur — 
with  a  vine  leaf  or  two  of  C  sharp  minor  or  F 
major  in  her  hair.  The  trick  lies  in  the  tone- 

56 


color — in  the  flabbergasting  magic  of  the  or- 
chestration. There  are  some  moments  in  "Elek- 
tra"  when  sounds  come  out  of  the  orchestra 
that  tug  at  the  very  roots  of  the  hair,  sounds 
so  unearthly  that  they  suggest  a  caroling  of 
dragons  or  bierfisch — and  yet  they  are  made  by 
the  same  old  fiddles  that  play  the  Kaiser  Quar- 
tet, and  by  the  same  old  trombones  that  the 
Valkyrie  ride  like  witch's  broomsticks,  and  by 
the  same  old  flutes  that  sob  and  snuffle  in  TitTs 
Serenade.  And  in  parts  of  "Feuersnot" — but 
Roget  must  be  rewritten  by  Strauss  before 
"Feuersnot"  is  described.  There  is  one  place 
where  the  harps,  taking  a  running  start  from 
the  scrolls  of  the  violins,  leap  slambang  through 
(or  is  it  into?)  the  firmament  of  Heaven. 
Once,  when  I  heard  this  passage  played  at  a 
concert,  a  woman  sitting  beside  me  rolled  over 
like  a  log,  and  had  to  be  hauled  out  by  the 
ushers. 

Yes ;  Strauss  is  the  man  to  reorchestrate  the 
symphonies  of  Schumann,  particularly  the  B 
flat,  the  Rhenish  and  the  Fourth.  I  doubt  that 
he  could  do  much  with  Schubert,  for  Schubert, 
though  he  is  dead  nearly  a  hundred  years,  yet 
remains  curiously  modern.  The  Unfinished 
symphony  is  full  of  exquisite  color  effects — 
consider,  for  example,  the  rustling  figure  for  the 
strings  in  the  first  movement — and  as  for  the  C 
major,  it  is  so  stupendous  a  debauch  of  melo- 
dic and  harmonic  beauty  that  one  scarcely  no- 
tices the  colors  at  all.  In  its  slow  movement 

57 


mere  loveliness  in  music  probably  says  all  that 
will  ever  be  said.  .  .  .  But  what  of  old  Lud- 
wig?  Har,  har;  here  we  begin  pulling  the  whis- 
kers of  Baal  Himself.  Nevertheless,  I  am  van- 
dal enough  to  wonder,  on  sad  Sunday  mornings, 
what  Strauss  could  do  with  the  first  movement 
of  the  C  minor.  More,  if  Strauss  ever  does  it 
and  lets  me  hear  the  result  just  once,  I'll  be 
glad  to  serve  six  months  in  jail  with  him.  .  .  . 
But  in  Munich,  of  course!  And  with  a  daily 
visitor's  pass  for  Cousin  Pschorr!  .  .  . 

The  conservatism  which  shrinks  at  such  bar- 
barities is  the  same  conservatism  which  demands 
that  the  very  typographical  errors  in  the  Bible 
be  swallowed  without  salt,  and  that  has  thus 
made  a  puerile  dream-book  of  parts  of  Holy 
Writ.  If  you  want  to  see  how  far  this  last  mad- 
ness has  led  Christendom  astray,  take  a  look 
at  an  article  by  Abraham  Mitrie  Rihbany,  an 
intelligent  Syrian,  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  of 
a  couple  of  years  ago.  The  title  of  the  article 
is  "The  Oriental  Manner  of  Speech,"  and  in  it 
Rihbany  shows  how  much  of  mere  Oriental  ex- 
travagance of  metaphor  is  to  be  found  in  many 
celebrated  passages,  and  how  little  of  literal  sig- 
nificance. This  Oriental  extravagance,  of 
course,  makes  for  beauty,  but  as  interpreted  by 
pundits  of  no  imagination  it  surely  doesn't 
make  for  understanding.  What  the  Western 
World  needs  is  a  Bible  in  which  the  idioms  of 
the  Aramaic  of  thousands  of  years  ago  are 
translated  into  the  idioms  of  today.  The  man  who 

58 


undertook  such  a  translation,  to  be  sure,  would 
be  uproariously  denounced,  just  as  Luther 
and  Wycliffe  were  denounced,  but  he  could  well 
afford  to  face  the  storm.  The  various  Revised 
Versions,  including  the  Modern  Speech  New 
Testament  of  Richard  Francis  Weymouth,  leave 
much  to  be  desired.  They  rectify  many  naif 
blunders  and  so  make  the  whole  narrative  more 
intelligible,  but  they  still  render  most  of  the 
tropes  of  the  original  literally. 

These  tropes  are  not  the  substance  of  Holy 
Writ;  they  are  simply  its  color.  In  the  same 
way  mere  tone-color  is  not  the  substance  of  a 
musical  composition.  Beethoven's  Eighth  Sym- 
phony is  just  as  great  a  work,  in  all  its  essen- 
tials, in  a  four-hand  piano  arrangement  as  in 
the  original  score.  Every  harmonic  and  mel- 
odic idea  of  the  composer  is  there ;  one  can  trace 
just  as  clearly  the  subtle  processes  of  his 
mind ;  every  step  in  the  working  out  of  the  ma- 
terials is  just  as  plain.  True  enough,  there  are 
orchestral  compositions  of  which  this  cannot  be 
reasonably  said ;  their  color  is  so  much  more  im- 
portant than  their  form  that  when  one  takes 
away  the  former  the  latter  almost  ceases  to  ex- 
ist. But  I  doubt  that  many  competent  critics 
would  argue  that  they  belong  to  the  first  rank. 
Form,  after  all,  is  the  important  thing.  It  is 
design  that  counts,  not  decoration — design  and 
organization.  The  pillars  of  a  musical  master- 
piece are  like  the  pillars  of  the  Parthenon ;  they 
are  almost  as  beautiful  bleached  white  as  they 
were  in  all  their  original  hues. 
59 


XXVIII 

A  FOOTNOTE  ON  THE  DUEL  OF  SEX 

If  I  were  a  woman  I  should  want  to  be  a 
blonde,  with  golden,  silky  hair,  pink  cheeks  and 
sky-blue  eyes.  It  would  not  bother  me  to  think 
that  this  color  scheme  was  mistaken  by  the 
world  for  a  flaunting  badge  of  stupidity ;  I 
would  have  a  better  arm  in  my  arsenal  than 
mere  intelligence;  I  would  get  a  husband  by 
easy  surrender  while  the  brunettes  attempted  it 
vainly  by  frontal  assault. 

Men  are  not  easily  taken  by  frontal  assault ; 
it  is  only  strategem  that  can  quickly  knock 
them  down.  To  be  a  blonde,  pink,  soft  and  del- 
icate, is  to  be  a  strategem.  It  is  to  be  a  ruse,  a 
feint,  an  ambush.  It  is  to  fight  under  the  Red 
Cross  flag.  A  man  sees  nothing  alert  and  de- 
signing in  those  pale,  crystalline  eyes;  he  sees 
only  something  helpless,  childish,  weak ;  some- 
thing that  calls  to  his  compassion;  something 
that  appeals  powerfully  to  his  conceit  in  his 
own  strength.  And  so  he  is  taken  before,  he 
knows  that  there  is  a  war.  He  lifts  his  port- 
cullis in  Christian  charity — and  the  enemy  is  in 
Jiis  citadel. 

The  brunette  can  make  no  such  stealthy  and 
sure  attack.  No  matter  how  subtle  her  art,  she 
can  never  hope  to  quite  conceal  her  intent.  Her 
eyes  give  her  away.  They  flash  and  glitter. 
They  have  depths.  They  draw  the  male  gaze 
into  mysterious  and  sinister  recesses.  And  sa 

60 


the  male  behind  the  gaze  flies  to  arms.  He  may 
be  taken  in  the  end — indeed,  he  usually  is — but 
he  is  not  taken  by  surprise;  he  is  not  taken 
without  a  fight.  A  brunette  has  to  battle  for 
every  inch  of  her  advance.  She  is  confronted 
by  an  endless  succession  of  Dead  Man's  Hills, 
each  equipped  with  telescopes,  semaphores, 
alarm  gongs,  wireless.  The  male  sees  her  clear- 
ly through  her  densest  smoke-clouds.  .  .  .  But 
the  blonde  captures  him  under  a  flag  of  truce. 
He  regards  her  tenderly,  kindly,  almost  pitying- 
ly, until  the  moment  the  gyves  are  upon  his 
wrists. 

It  is  all  an  optical  matter,  a  question  of 
color.  The  pastel  shades  deceive  him ;  the  louder 
hues  send  him  to  his  artillery.  God  help,  I  say, 
the  red-haired  girl!  She  goes  into  action  with 
warning  pennants  flying.  The  dullest,  blindest 
man  can  see  her  a  mile  away;  he  can  catch  the 
alarming  flash  of  her  hair  long  before  he  can 
see  the  whites,  or  even  the  terrible  red-browns, 
of  her  eyes.  She  has  a  long  field  to  cross,  heav- 
ily under  defensive  fire,  before  she  can  get  into 
rifle  range.  Her  quarry  has  a  chance  to  throw 
up  redoubts,  to  dig  himself  in,  to  call  for  rein- 
forcements, to  elude  her  by  ignominious  flight. 
She  must  win,  if  she  is  to  win  at  all,  by  an  un- 
paralleled combination  of  craft  and  resolu- 
tion. She  must  be  swift,  daring,  merciless. 
Even  the  brunette  of  black  and  penetrating  eye 
has  great  advantages  over  her.  No  wonder  she 
never  lets  go,  once  her  arms  are  around  her 

61 


antagonist's  neck!  No  wonder  she  is,  of  all 
women,  the  hardest  to  shake  off ! 

All  nature  works  in  circles.  Causes  become 
effects;  effects  develop  into  causes.  The  red- 
haired  girl's  dire  need  of  courage  and  cunning 
has  augmented  her  store  of  those  qualities  by 
the  law  of  natural  selection.  She  is,  by  long 
odds,  the  most  intelligent  and  bemusing  of  wom- 
en. She  shows  cunning,  foresight,  technique, 
variety.  She  always  fails  a  dozen  times  before 
she  succeeds ;  but  she  brings  to  the  final  business 
the  abominable  expertness  of  a  Ludendorff ;  she 
has  learnt  painfully  by  the  process  of  trial  and 
error.  Red-haired  girls  are  intellectual  stimu- 
lants. They  know  all  the  tricks.  They  are  so 
clever  that  they  have  even  cast  a  false  glamour 
of  beauty  about  their  worst  defect — their  harsh 
and  gaudy  hair.  They  give  it  euphemistic  and 
deceitful  names — auburn,  bronze,  Titian.  They 
overcome  by  their  hellish  arts  that  deep-seated 
dread  of  red  which  is  inborn  in  all  of  God's 
creatures.  They  charm  men  with  what  would 
even  alarm  bulls. 

And  the  blondes,  by  following  the  law  of  least 
resistance,  have  gone  in  the  other  direction.  The 
great  majority  of  them — I  speak,  of  course,  of 
natural  blondes;  not  of  the  immoral  wenches 
who  work  their  atrocities  under  cover  of  a  syn- 
thetic blondeness — are  quite  as  shallow  and 
stupid  as  they  look.  One  seldom  hears  a  blonde 
say  anything  worth  hearing ;  the  most  they  com- 
monly achieve  is  a  specious,  baby-like  prattling, 

62 


an  infantile  artlessness.  But  let  us  not  blame 
them  for  nature's  work.  Why,  after  all,  be  in- 
telligent? It  is,  at  best,  no  more  than  a  capa- 
ity  for  unhappiness.  The  blonde  not  only 
doesn't  miss  it;  she  is  even  better  off  without 
it.  What  imaginable  intelligence  could  compen- 
sate her  for  the  flat  blueness  of  her  eyes,  the 
xanthous  pallor  of  her  hair,  the  doll-like  pink 
of  her  cheeks  ?  What  conceivable  cunning  could 
do  such  execution  as  her  stupendous  appeal  to 
masculine  vanity,  sentimentality,  egoism? 

If  I  were  a  woman  I  should  want  to  be  a 
blonde.  By  blondeness  might  be  hideous,  but  it 
would  get  me  a  husband,  and  it  would  make  him 
cherish  me  and  love  me. 


63 


XXIX 

ALCOHOL 

Envy,  as  I  have  said,  is  at  the  heart  of  the 
messianic  delusion,  the  mania  to  convert  the 
happy  sinner  into  a  "good"  man,  and  so  make 
him  miserable.  And  at  the  heart  of  that  envy  is 
fear — the  fear  to  sin,  to  take  a  chance,  to  mon- 
key with  the  buzzsaw.  This  ineradicable  fear  is 
the  outstanding  mark  of  the  fifth-rate  man,  at 
all  times  and  everywhere.  It  dominates  his  poli- 
tics, his  theology,  his  whole  thinking.  He  is  a 
moral  fellow  because  he  is  afraid  to  venture 
over  the  fence — and  he  hates  the  man  who  is 
not. 

The  solemn  proofs,  so  laboriously  deduced 
from  life  insurance  statistics,  that  the  man  who 
uses  alcohol,  even  moderately,  dies  slightly  soon- 
er than  the  teetotaler — these  proofs  merely 
show  that  this  man  is  one  who  leads  an  active 
and  vigorous  life,  and  so  faces  hazards  and 
uses  himself  up — in  brief,  one  who  lives  at  high 
tempo  and  with  full  joy,  what  Nietzsche  used 
to  call  the  ja-sager,  or  yes-sayer.  He  may,  in 
fact,  die  slightly  sooner  than  the  teetotaler,  but 
he  lives  infinitely  longer.  Moreover,  his  life, 
humanly  speaking,  is  much  more  worth  while,  to 
himself  and  to  the  race.  He  does  the  hard  and 
dangerous  work  of  the  world,  he  takes  the 
chances,  he  makes  the  experiments.  He  is  the 
soldier,  the  artist,  the  innovator,  the  lover.  All 
the  great  works  of  man  have  been  done  by  men 

64 


who  thus  lived  joyously,  strenuously,  and  per- 
haps a  bit  dangerously.  They  have  never  been 
concerned  about  stretching  life  for  two  or  three 
more  years ;  they  have  been  concerned  about 
making  life  engrossing  and  stimulating  and  a 
high  adventure  while  it  lasts.  Teetotalism  is  as 
impossible  to  such  men  as  any  other  manifesta- 
tion of  cowardice,  and,  if  it  were  possible,  it 
would  destroy  their  utility  and  significance  just 
as  certainly. 

A  man  who  shrinks  from  a  cocktail  before 
dinner  on  the  ground  that  it  may  flabbergast 
his  hormones,  and  so  make  him  die  at  69  years, 
ten  months  and  five  days  instead  of  at  69  years, 
eleven  months  and  seven  days — such  a  man  is  as 
absurd  a  poltroon  as  the  fellow  who  shrinks 
from  kissing  a  woman  on  the  ground  that  she 
may  floor  him  with  a  chair  leg.  Each  flees 
from  a  purely  theoretical  risk.  Each  is  a  use- 
less encumberer  of  the  earth,  and  the  sooner 
dead  the  better.  Each  is  a  discredit  to  the  hu- 
man race,  already  discreditable  enough,  God 
knows. 

Teetotalism  does  not  make  for  human  happi- 
ness ;  it  makes  for  the  dull,  idiotic  happiness  of 
the  barnyard.  The  men  who  do  things  in  the 
world,  the  men  worthy  of  admiration  and  imi- 
tation, are  men  constitutionally  incapable  of 
any  such  pecksniffian  stupidity.  Their  ideal  is 
not  a  safe  life,  but  a  full  life;  they  do  not  try 
to  follow  the  canary  bird  in  a  cage,  but  the 
eagle  in  the  air.  And  in  particular  they  do  not 

65 


flee  from  shadows  and  bugaboos.  The  alcohol 
myth  is  such  a  bugaboo.  The  sort  of  man  it 
scares  is  the  sort  of  man  whose  chief  mark  is 
that  he  is  always  scared. 

No  wonder  the  Rockefellers  and  their  like  are 
hot  for  saving  the  workingman  from  John 
Barleycorn !  Imagine  the  advantage  to  them 
of  operating  upon  a  flabby  horde  of  timorous 
and  joyless  slaves,  afraid  of  all  fun  and  kick- 
ing up,  horribly  moral,  eager  only  to  live  as 
long  as  possible !  What  mule-like  fidelity  and 
efficiency  could  be  got  out  of  such  a  rabble! 
But  how  many  Lincolns  would  you  get  out  of 
it,  and  how  many  Jacksons,  and  how  many 
Grants? 


66 


XXX 

THOUGHTS  ON  THE  VOLUPTUOUS 

Why  has  no  publisher  ever  thought  of  per- 
fuming his  novels  ?  The  final  refinement  of  pub- 
lishing, already  bedizened  by  every  other  art! 
Barabbas  turned  Petronius  !  For  instance,  con- 
sider the  bucolic  romances  of  the  hyphenated 
Mrs.  Porter.  They  have  a  subtle  flavor  of  new- 
mown  hay  and  daffodils  already;  why  not  add 
the  actual  essence,  or  at  all  events  some  safe 
coal-tar  substitute,  and  so  help  imagination  to 
spread  its  wings?  For  Hall  Caine,  musk  and 
synthetic  bergamot.  For  Mrs.  Glyn  and  her 
neighbors  on  the  tiger-skin,  the  fragrant  blood 
of  the  red,  red  rose.  For  the  ruffianish  pages 
of  Jack  London,  the  pungent,  hospitable  smell 
of  a  first-class  bar-room — that  indescribable 
mingling  of  Maryland  rye,  cigar  smoke,  stale 
malt  liquor,  radishes,  potato  salad  and  blut- 
wurst.  For  the  Dartmoor  sagas  of  the  inter- 
minable Phillpotts,  the  warm  ammoniacal  bou- 
quet of  cows,  poultry  and  yokels.  For  the 
"Dodo"  school,  violets  and  Russian  cigarettes. 
For  the  venerable  Howells,  lavender  and 
mignonette.  For  Zola,  Rochef  ort  and  wet  leath- 
er. For  Mrs.  Humphrey  Ward,  lilies  of  the 
valley.  For  Marie  Corelli,  tuberoses  and  em- 
balming fluid.  For  Chambers,  sachet  and  lip 
paint.  For 

But  I  leave  you  to  make  your  own  choices. 
All  I  offer  is  the  general  idea.  It  has  been  tried 


in  the  theatre.  Well  do  I  remember  the  first 
weeks  of  "Florodora"  at  the  old  Casino,  with 
a  mannikin  in  the  lobby  squirting  "La  Flor  de 
Florodora"  upon  all  us  Florodorans.  ...  I 
was  put  on  trial  for  my  life  when  I  got  home ! 


XXXI 

THE  HOLY  ESTATE 

Marriage  is  always  a  man's  second  choice.  It 
is  entered  upon,  more  often  than  not,  as  the  saf- 
est form  of  intrigue.  The  caitiff  yields  quick- 
est; the  man  who  loves  danger  and  adventure 
holds  out  longest.  Behind  it  one  frequently 
finds,  not  that  lofty  romantic  passion  which 
poets  hymn,  but  a  mere  yearning  for  peace  and 
security.  The  abominable  hazards  of  the  high 
seas,  the  rough  humors  and  pestilences  of  the 
forecastle — these  drive  the  timid  mariner 
ashore.  .  .  .  The  authentic  Cupid,  at  least  in 
Christendom,  was  discovered  by  the  late  Albert 
Ludwig  Siegmund  Neisser  in  1879. 


60 


XXXII 

DICHTUNG  UND  WAHRHEIT 

Deponent,  being  duly  sworn,  saith :  My  taste 
in  poetry  is  for  delicate  and  fragile  things — to 
be  honest,  for  artificial  things.  I  like  a  frail  but 
perfectly  articulated  stanza,  a  sonnet  Wrought 
like  ivory,  a  song  full  of  glowing  nouns,  verbs, 
adjectives,  adverbs,  pronouns,  conjunctions, 
prepositions  and  participles,  but  without  too 
much  hard  sense  to  it.  Poetry,  to  me,  has  but 
two  meanings.  On  the  one  hand,  it  is  a  magical 
escape  from  the  sordidness  of  metabolism  and 
the  class  war,  and  on  the  other  hand  it  is  a  sub- 
tle, very  difficult  and  hence  very  charming  art, 
like  writing  fugues  or  mixing  mayonnaise.  I 
do  not  go  to  poets  to  be  taught  anything,  or 
to  be  heated  up  to  indignation,  or  to  have  my 
conscience  blasted  out  of  its  torpor,  but  to  be 
soothed  and  caressed,  to  be  lulled  with  sweet 
sounds,  to  be  wooed  into  forgetfulness,  to  be 
tickled  under  the  metaphysical  chin.  My  favor- 
ite poem  is  Lizette  Woodworth  Reese's  "Tears," 
which,  as  a  statement  of  fact,  seems  to  me  to 
be  as  idiotic  as  the  Book  of  Revelation.  The 
poetry  I  regard  least  is  such  stuff  as  that  of 
Robert  Browning  and  Matthew  Arnold,  which 
argues  and  illuminates.  I  dislike  poetry  of  in- 
tellectual content  as  much  as  I  dislike  women 
of  intellectual  content — and  for  the  same  rea- 
son. 


XXXIII 

WILD  SHOTS 

If  I  had  the  time,  and  there  were  no  sweeter 
follies  offering,  I  should  like  to  write  an  essay 
on  the  books  that  have  quite  failed  of  achieving 
their  original  purposes,  and  are  yet  of  respect- 
able use  and  potency  for  other  purposes.  For 
example,  the  Book  of  Revelation.  The  obvious 
aim  of  the  learned  author  of  this  work  was  to 
bring  the  early  Christians  into  accord  by  tell- 
ing them  authoritatively  what  to  expect  and 
hope  for ;  its  actual  effect  during  eighteen  hun- 
dred years  has  been  to  split  them  into  a  multi- 
tude of  camps,  and  so  set  them  to  denouncing, 
damning,  jailing  and  murdering  one  another. 
Again,  consider  the  autobiography  of  Benve- 
nuto  Cellini.  Ben  wrote  it  to  prove  that  he 
was  an  honest  man,  a  mirror  of  all  the  virtues, 
an  injured  innocent;  the  world,  reading  it,  hails 
him  respectfully  as  the  noblest,  the  boldest,  the 
gaudiest  liar  that  ever  lived.  Again,  turn  to 
"Gulliver's  Travels."  The  thing  was  planned 
by  its  rev.  author  as  a  devastating  satire,  a  ter- 
rible piece  of  cynicism;  it  survives  as  a  story- 
book for  sucklings.  Yet  again,  there  is  "Ham- 
let." Shakespeare  wrote  it  frankly  to  make 
money  for  a  theatrical  manager;  it  has  lost 
money  for  theatrical  managers  ever  since.  Yet 
again,  there  is  Caesar's  "De  Bello  Gallico." 
Julius  composed  it  to  thrill  and  arouse  the  Ro- 
mans ;  its  sole  use  today  is  to  stupefy  and  sicken 

7i 


schoolboys.  Finally,  there  is  the  celebrated 
book  of  General  F.  von  Bernhardi.  He  wrote 
it  to  inflame  Germany ;  its  effect  was  to  inflame 
England.  .  .  . 

The  list  might  be  lengthened  almost  ad  infini- 
tum.  When  a  man  writes  a  book  he  fires  a  ma- 
chine gun  into  a  wood.  The  game  he  brings 
down  often  astonishes  him,  and  sometimes  hor- 
rifies him.  Consider  the  case  of  Ibsen.  .  .  . 
After  my  book  on  Nietzsche  I  was  actually  in- 
vited to  lecture  at  Princeton. 


XXXIV 

BEETHOVEN 

Romain  Holland's  "Beethoven,"  one  of  the 
cornerstones  of  his  celebrity  as  a  critic,  is  based 
upon  a  thesis  that  is  of  almost  inconceivable  in- 
accuracy, to  wit,  the  thesis  that  old  Ludwig  was 
an  apostle  of  joy,  and  that  his  music  reveals  his 
determination  to  experience  and  utter  it  in  spite 
of  all  the  slings  and  arrows  of  outrageous  for- 
tune. Nothing  could  be  more  absurd.  Joy,  in 
truth,  was  precisely  the  emotion  that  Beethoven 
could  never  conjure  up;  it  simply  was  not  in 
him.  Turn  to  scherzo  of  any  of  his  trios,  quar- 
tets, sonatas  or  symphonies.  A  sardonic  wag- 
gishness  is  there,  and  sometimes  even  a  wistful 
sort  of  merriment,  but  joy  in  the  real  sense — 
a  kicking  up  of  legs,  a  light-heartedness,  a 
complete  freedom  from  care — is  not  to  be  found. 
It  is  in  Haydn,  it  is  in  Schubert  and  it  is  often 
in  Mozart,  but  it  is  no  more  in  Beethoven  than 
it  is  in  Tschaikovsky.  Even  the  hymn  to  joy 
at  the  end  of  the  Ninth  symphony  narrowly 
escapes  being  a  gruesome  parody  on  the  thing 
itself ;  a  conscious  effort  is  in  every  note  of  it ; 
it  is  almost  as  lacking  in  spontaneity  as  (if  it 
were  imaginable  at  all)  a  piece  of  vers  libre  by 
Augustus  Montague  Toplady. 

Nay ;  Ludwig  was  no  leaping  buck.  Nor  was  it 
his  deafness,  nor  poverty,  nor  the  crimes  of  his 
rascally  nephew  that  pumped  joy  out  of  him. 
The  truth  is  that  he  lacked  it  from  birth;  he 

73 


was  born  a  Puritan — and  though  a  Puritan  may 
also  become  a  great  man  (as  witness  Herbert 
Spencer  and  Beelzebub) ,  he  can  never  throw  off 
being  a  Puritan.  Beethoven  stemmed  from  the 
Low  Countries,  and  the  Low  Countries,  in  those 
days,  were  full  of  Puritan  refugees;  the  very 
name,  in  its  first  incarnation,  may  have  been 
Barebones.  If  you  want  to  comprehend  the  au- 
thentic man,  don't  linger  over  Holland's  fancies 
but  go  to  his  own  philosophizings,  as  garnered 
in  "Beethoven,  the  Man  and  the  Artist,"  by 
Friedrich  Kerst,  Englished  by  Krehbiel.  Here 
you  will  find  a  collection  of  moral  banalities  that 
would  have  delighted  Jonathan  Edwards — a  col- 
lection that  might  well  be  emblazoned  on  gilt 
cards  and  hung  in  Sunday  schools.  He  begins 
with  a  naif  anthropomorphism  that  is  now  al- 
most perished  from  the  world;  he  ends  with  a 
solemn  repudiation  of  adultery.  .  .  .  But  a 
great  man,  my  masters,  a  great  man !  We  have 
enough  biographies  of  him,  and  talmuds  upon 
his  works.  Who  will  do  a  full-length  psycholog- 
ical study  of  him? 


74 


XXXV 

THE  TONE  ART 

The  notion  that  the  aim  of  art  is  to  fix  the 
shifting  aspects  of  nature,  that  all  art  is  pri- 
marily representative — this  notion  is  as  un- 
sound as  the  theory  that  Friday  is  an  unlucky 
day,  and  is  dying  as  hard.  One  even  finds  some 
trace  of  it  in  Anatole  France,  surely  a  man  who 
should  know  better.  The  true  function  of  art 
is  to  criticise,  embellish  and  edit  nature — par- 
ticularly to  edit  it,  and  so  make  it  coherent  and 
lovely.  The  artist  is  a  sort  of  impassioned 
proof-reader,  blue-pencilling  the  lapsus  calami 
of  God.  The  sounds  in  a  Beethoven  symphony, 
even  the  Pastoral,  are  infinitely  more  orderly, 
varied  and  beautiful  than  those  of  the  woods. 
The  worst  flute  is  never  as  bad  as  the  worst  so- 
prano. The  best  violoncello  is  immeasurably 
better  than  the  best  tenor. 

All  first-rate  music  suffers  by  the  fact  that  it 
has  to  be  performed  by  human  beings — that  is, 
that  nature  must  be  permitted  to  corrupt  it. 
The  performance  one  hears  in  a  concert  hall  or 
opera  house  is  no  more  than  a  baroque  parody 
upon  the  thing  the  composer  imagined.  In  an 
orchestra  of  eighty  men  there  is  inevitably  at 
least  one  man  with  a  sore  thumb,  or  bad  kidneys, 
or  a  brutal  wife,  or  katzen jammer — and  one  is 
enough.  Some  day  the  natural  clumsiness  and 
imperfection  of  fingers,  lips  and  larynxes 

75 


be  overcome  by  mechanical  devices,  and  we  shall 
have  Beethoven  and  Mozart  and  Schubert  in 
such  wonderful  and  perfect  beauty  that  it  will 
be  almost  unbearable.  If  half  as  much  ingen- 
uity had  been  lavished  upon  music  machines  as 
has  been  lavished  upon  the  telephone  and  the 
steam  engine,  we  would  have  had  mechanical  or- 
chestras long  ago.  Mechanical  pianos  are  al- 
ready here.  Piano-players,  bound  to  put  some 
value  on  the  tortures  of  Czerny,  affect  to  laugh 
at  all  such  contrivances,  but  that  is  no  more 
than  a  pale  phosphorescence  of  an  outraged 
wille  zur  macht.  Setting  aside  half  a  dozen — 
perhaps  a  dozen — great  masters  of  a  moribund 
craft,  who  will  say  that  the  average  mechanical 
piano  is  not  as  competent  as  the  average 
pianist? 

When  the  human  performer  of  music  goes  the 
way  of  the  galley-slave,  the  charm  of  personal- 
ity, of  course,  will  be  pumped  out  of  the  per- 
formance of  music.  But  the  charm  of  person- 
ality does  not  help  music;  it  hinders  it.  It  is 
not  a  reinforcement  to  music;  it  is  a  rival. 
When  a  beautiful  singer  comes  upon  the  stage, 
two  shows,  as  it  were,  go  on  at  once:  first  the 
music  show,  and  then  the  arms,  shoulders,  neck, 
nose,  ankles,  eyes,  hips,  calves  and  ruby  lips — 
in  brief,  the  sex-show.  The  second  of  these 
shows,  to  the  majority  of  persons  present,  is 
more  interesting  than  the  first — to  the  men  be- 
cause of  the  sex  interest,  and  to  the  women  be- 
cause of  the  professional  or  technical  interest — 

76 


and  so  music  is  forced  into  the  background. 
What  it  becomes,  indeed,  is  no  more  than  a  half- 
heard  accompaniment  to  an  imagined  anecdate, 
just  as  color,  line  and  mass  become  mere  ac- 
complishments to  an  anecdote  in  a  picture  by  an 
English  academician,  or  by  a  sentimental  Ger- 
man of  the  Boecklin  school. 

The  purified  and  dephlogisticated  music  of 
the  future,  to  be  sure,  will  never  appeal  to  the 
mob,  which  will  keep  on  demanding  its  chance 
to  gloat  over  gaudy,  voluptuous  women,  and 
fat,  scandalous  tenors.  The  mob,  even  disre- 
garding its  insatiable  appetite  for  the  improper, 
is  a  natural  hero  worshiper.  It  loves,  not  the 
beautiful,  but  the  strange,  the  unprecedented, 
the  astounding;  it  suffers  from  an  incurable 
heliogabalisme.  A  soprano  who  can  gargle  her 
way  up  to  G  sharp  in  altissimo  interests  it  al- 
most as  much  as  a  contralto  who  has  slept  pub- 
licly with  a  grand  duke.  If  it  cannot  get  the 
tenor  who  receives  $3,000  a  night,  it  will  take 
the  tenor  who  fought  the  manager  with  bung- 
starters  last  Tuesday.  But  this  is  merely  say- 
ing that  the  tastes  and  desires  of  the  mob  have 
nothing  to  do  with  music  as  an  art.  For  its 
ears,  as  for  its  eyes,  it  demands  anecdotes — on 
the  one  hand  the  Suicide  symphony,  "The  Forge 
in  the  Forest,"  and  the  general  run  of  Italian 
opera,  and  on  the  other  hand  such  things  as 
"The  Angelus,"  "Playing  Grandpa"  and  the  so- 
called  "Mona  Lisa."  It  cannot  imagine  art  as 
devoid  of  moral  content,  as  beauty  pure  and 

77 


simple.     It  always  demands  something  to  edify 
it,  or,  failing  that,  to  shock  it. 

These  concepts,  of  the  edifying  and  the 
shocking,  are  closer  together  in  the  psyche  than 
most  persons  imagine.  The  one,  in  fact,  de- 
pends upon  the  other :  without  some  definite  no- 
tion of  the  improving  it  is  almost  impossible  to 
conjure  up  an  active  notion  of  the  improper. 
All  salacious  art  is  addressed,  not  to  the 
damned,  but  to  the  consciously  saved ;  it  is  Sun- 
day-school superintendents,  not  bartenders,  who 
chiefly  patronize  peep-shows,  and  know  the  dirty 
books,  and  have  a  high  artistic  admiration  for 
sopranos  of  superior  gluteal  development.  The 
man  who  has  risen  above  the  petty  ethical  super- 
stitions of  Christendom  gets  little  pleasure  out 
of  impropriety,  for  very  few  ordinary  phenom- 
ena seem  to  him  to  be  improper.  Thus  a 
Frenchman,  viewing  the  undraped  statues  which 
bedizen  his  native  galleries  of  art,  either  enjoys 
them  in  a  purely  aesthetic  fashion — which  is 
seldom  possible  save  when  he  is  in  liquor — or 
confesses  frankly  that  he  doesn't  like  them  at 
all ;  whereas  the  visiting  Americano  is  so  power- 
fully shocked  and  fascinated  by  them  that  one 
finds  him,  the  same  evening,  in  places  where  no 
respectable  man  ought  to  go.  All  art,  to  this 
fellow,  must  have  a  certain  bawdiness,  or  he 
cannot  abide  it.  His  favorite  soprano,  in  the 
opera  house,  is  not  the  fat  and  middle-aged 
lady  who  can  actually  sing,  but  the  girl  with 
the  bare  back  and  translucent  drawers.  Con- 

78 


descending  to  the  concert  hall,  he  is  bored  by 
the  posse  of  enemy  aliens  in  funereal  black,  and 
so  demands  a  vocal  soloist — that  is,  a  gaudy 
creature  of  such  advanced  corsetting  that  she 
can  make  him  forget  Bach  for  a  while,  and 
turn  his  thoughts  pleasantly  to  amorous  in- 
trigue. 

In  all  this,  of  course,  there  is  nothing  new. 
Other  and  better  men  have  noted  the  damage 
that  the  personal  equation  does  to  music,  and 
some  of  them  have  even  sought  ways  out.  For 
example,  Richard  Strauss.  His  so-called  ballet, 
^"  Josefs  Legend,"  produced  in  Paris  just  be- 
fore the  war,  is  an  attempt  to  write  an  opera 
without  singers.  All  of  the  music  is  in  the  or- 
chestra ;  the  folks  on  the  stage  merely  go 
through  a  pointless  pantomime;  their  main 
function  is  to  entertain  the  eye  with  shifting 
colors.  Thus,  the  romantic  sentiments  of  Jo- 
seph are  announced,  not  by  some  eye-rolling 
tenor,  but  by  the  first,  second,  third,  fourth, 
fifth,  sixth,  seventh  and  eighth  violins  (it  is  a 
Strauss  score!),  with  the  incidental  aid  of  the 
wood-wind,  the  brass,  the  percussion  and  the 
rest  of  the  strings.  And  the  heroine's  reply  is 
made,  not  by  a  soprano  with  a  cold,  but  by  an 
honest  man  playing  a  flute.  The  next  step  will 
be  the  substitution  of  marionettes  for  actors. 
The  removal  of  the  orchestra  to  a  sort  of 
trench,  out  of  sight  of  the  audience,  is  already 
an  accomplished  fact  at  Munich.  The  end,  per- 
haps, will  be  music  purged  of  its  current  pto- 
maines. In  brief,  music. 

79 


XXXVI 

zoos 

I  often  wonder  how  much  sound  and  nourish- 
ing food  is  fed  to  the  animals  in  the  zoological 
gardens  of  America  every  week,  and  try  to  fig- 
ure out  what  the  public  gets  in  return  for  the 
cost  thereof.  The  annual  bill  must  surely  run 
into  millions;  one  is  constantly  hearing  how 
much  beef  a  lion  downs  at  a  meal,  and  how 
many  tons  of  hay  an  elephant  dispatches  in  a 
month.  And  to  what  end?  To  the  end,  princi- 
pally, that  a  horde  of  superintendents  and  keep- 
ers may  be  kept  in  easy  jobs.  To  the  end, 
secondarily,  that  the  least  intelligent  minority 
of  the  population  may  have  an  idiotic  show  to 
gape  at  on  Sunday  afternoons,  and  that  the 
young  of  the  species  may  be  instructed  in  the 
methods  of  amour  prevailing  among  chimpan- 
zees and  become  privy  to  the  technic  employed 
by  jaguars,  hyenas  and  polar  bears  in  ridding 
themselves  of  lice. 

So  far  as  I  can  make  out,  after  laborious  vis- 
its to  all  the  chief  zoos  of  the  nation,  no  other 
imaginable  purpose  is  served  by  their  existence. 
One  hears  constantly,  true  enough  (mainly  from 
the  gentlemen  they  support)  that  they  are  edu- 
cational. But  how?  Just  what  sort  of  instruc- 
tion do  they  radiate,  and  what  is  its  value?  I 
have  never  been  able  to  find  out.  The  sober 
truth  is  that  they  are  no  more  educational  than 
so  many  firemen's  parades  or  displays  of  sky- 
So 


rockets,  and  that  all  they  actually  offer  to  the 
public  in  return  for  the  taxes  wasted  upon  them 
is  a  form  of  idle  and  witless  amusement,  com- 
pared to  which  a  visit  to  a  penitentiary,  or  even 
to  Congress  or  a  state  legislature  in  session,  is 
informing,  stimulating  and  ennobling. 

Education  your  grandmother!  Show  me  a 
schoolboy  who  has  ever  learned  anything  val- 
uable or  important  by  watching  a  mangy  old 
lion  snoring  away  in  its  cage  or  a  family  of 
monkeys  fighting  for  peanuts.  To  get  any  use- 
ful instruction  out  of  such  a  spectacle  is  palpa- 
bly impossible;  not  even  a  college  professor  is 
improved  by  it.  The  most  it  can  imaginably 
impart  is  that  the  stripes  of  a  certain  sort  of 
tiger  run  one  way  and  the  stripes  of  another 
sort  some  other  way,  that  hyenas  and  polecats 
smell  worse  than  Greek  'bus  boys,  that  the  Latin 
name  of  the  raccoon  (who  was  unheard  of  by 
the  Romans)  is  Procyon  lot  or.  For  the  dis- 
semination of  such  banal  knowledge,  absurdly 
emitted  and  defectively  taken  in,  the  taxpayers 
of  the  United  States  are  mulcted  in  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  dollars  a  year.  As  well  make  them 
pay  for  teaching  policemen  the  theory  of  least 
squares,  or  for  instructing  roosters  in  the  laying 
of  eggs. 

But  zoos,  it  is  argued,  are  of  scientific  value. 
They  enable  learned  men  to  study  this  or  that. 
Again  the  facts  blast  the  theory.  No  scientific 
discovery  of  any  value  whatsoever,  even  to  the 
animals  themselves,  has  ever  come  out  of  a  zoo. 

81 


The  zoo  scientist  is  the  old  woman  of  zoology, 
and  his  alleged  wisdom  is  usually  exhibited,  not 
in  the  groves  of  actual  learning,  but  in  the  yel- 
low journals.  He  is  to  biology  what  the  late 
Camille  Flammarion  was  to  astronomy,  which 
is  to  say,  its  court  jester  and  reductio  ad  ab- 
surdum.  When  he  leaps  into  public  notice  with 
some  new  pearl  of  knowledge,  it  commonly  turns 
out  to  be  no  more  than  the  news  that  Marie 
Bashkirtseff,  the  Russian  lady  walrus,  has  had 
her  teeth  plugged  with  zinc  and  is  expecting 
twins.  Or  that  Pishposh,  the  man-eating  alli- 
gator, is  down  with  locomotor  ataxia.  Or  that 
Damon,  the  grizzly,  has  just  finished  his  brother 
Pythias  in  the  tenth  round,  chewing  off  his  tail, 
nose  and  remaining  ear. 

Science,  of  course,  has  its  uses  for  the  lower 
animals.  A  diligent  study  of  their  livers  and 
lights  helps  to  an  understanding  of  the  anat- 
omy and  physiology,  and  particularly  of  the 
pathology,  of  man.  They  are  necessary  aids  in 
devising  and  manufacturing  many  remedial 
agents,  and  in  testing  the  virtues  of  those  al- 
ready devised;  out  of  the  mute  agonies  of  a 
rabbit  or  a  calf  may  come  relief  for  a  baby  with 
diphtheria,  or  means  for  an  archdeacon  to  es- 
cape the  consequences  of  his  youthful  follies. 
Moreover,  something  valuable  is  to  be  got  out 
of  a  mere  study  of  their  habits,  instincts  and 
ways  of  mind — knowledge  that,  by  analogy,  may 
illuminate  the  parallel  doings  of  the  germs  homo, 
and  so  enable  us  to  comprehend  the  primitive 

82 


mental  processes  of  Congressmen,  morons  and 
the  rev.  clergy. 

But  it  must  be  obvious  that  none  of  these 
studies  can  be  made  in  a  zoo.  The  zoo  animals, 
to  begin  with,  provide  no  material  for  the  biol- 
ogist; he  can  find  out  no  more  about  their  in- 
sides  than  what  he  discerns  from  a  safe  distance 
and  through  the  bars.  He  is  not  allowed  to  try 
his  germs  and  specifics  upon  them ;  he  is  not  al- 
lowed to  vivisect  them.  If  he  would  find  out 
what  goes  on  in  the  animal  body  under  this  con^ 
dition  or  that,  he  must  turn  from  the  inhab- 
itants of  the  zoo  to  the  customary  guinea  pigs 
and  street  dogs,  and  buy  or  steal  them  for  him- 
self. Nor  does  he  get  any  chance  for  profitable 
inquiry  when  zoo  animals  die  (usually  of  lack 
of  exercise  or  ignorant  doctoring),  for  their 
carcasses  are  not  handed  to  him  for  autopsy, 
but  at  once  stuffed  with  gypsum  and  excelsior 
and  placed  in  some  museum. 

Least  of  all  do  zoos  produce  any  new  knowl- 
edge about  animal  behavior.  Such  knowledge 
must  be  got,  not  from  animals  penned  up  and 
tortured,  but  from  animals  in  a  state  of  nature. 
A  college  professor  studying  the  habits  of  the 
giraffe,  for  example,  and  confining  his  observa- 
tions to  specimens  in  zoos,  would  inevitably 
come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  giraffe  is  a 
sedentary  and  melancholy  beast,  standing  im- 
movable for  hours  at  a  time  and  employing  an 
Italian  to  feed  him  hay  and  cabbages.  As  well 
proceed  to  a  study  of  the  psychology  of  a  juris- 

83 


consult  by  first  immersing  him  in  Sing  Sing, 
or  of  a  juggler  by  first  cutting  off  his  hands. 
Knowledge  so  gained  is  inaccurate  and  imbecile 
knowledge.  Not  even  a  college  professor,  if 
sober,  would  give  it  any  faith  and  credit. 

There  remains,  then,  the  only  true  utility  of 
a  zoo:  it  is  a  childish  and  pointless  show  for 
the  unintelligent,  in  brief,  for  children,  nurse- 
maids, visiting  yokels  and  the  generality  of  the 
defective.  Should  the  taxpayers  be  forced  to 
sweat  millions  for  such  a  purpose  ?  I  think  not. 
The  sort  of  man  who  likes  to  spend  his  time 
watching  a  cage  of  monkeys  chase  one  another, 
or  a  lion  gnaw  its  tail,  or  a  lizard  catch  flies,  is 
precisely  the  sort  of  man  whose  mental  weak- 
ness should  be  combatted  at  the  public  expense, 
and  not  fostered.  He  is  a  public  liability  and  a 
public  menace,  and  society  should  seek  to  im- 
prove him.  Instead  of  that,  we  spend  a  lot  of 
money  to  feed  his  degrading  appetite  and 
further  paralyze  his  mind.  It  is  precisely  as  if 
the  community  provided  free  champagne  for 
dipsomaniacs,  or  hired  lecturers  to  convert  the 
army  to  the  doctrines  of  the  Bolsheviki. 

Of  the  abominable  cruelties  practised  in  zoos 
it  is  unnecessary  to  make  mention.  Even  assum- 
ing that  all  the  keepers  are  men  of  delicate  na- 
tures and  ardent  zoophiles  (which  is  about  as 
safe  as  assuming  that  the  keepers  of  a  prison 
are  all  sentimentalists,  and  weep  for  the  sorrows 
of  their  charges),  it  must  be  plain  that  the  «vork 
they  do  involves  an  endless  war  upon  the  native 

84 


instincts  of  the  animals,  and  that  they  must  thus 
inflict  the  most  abominable  tortures  ever}'  day. 
What  could  be  a  sadder  sight  than  a  tiger  in  a 
cage,  save  it  be  a  forest  monkey  climbing  dis- 
pairingly  up  a  barked  stump,  or  an  eagle 
chained  to  its  roost?  How  can  man  be  bene- 
fitted  and  made  better  by  robbing  the  seal  of  its 
arctic  ice,  the  hippopotamus  of  its  soft  wallow, 
the  buffalo  of  its  open  range,  the  lion  of  its 
kingship,  the  birds  of  their  air? 

I  am  no  sentimentalist,  God  knows.  I  am  in 
favor  of  vivisection  unrestrained,  so  long  as  the 
vivisectionist  knows  what  he  is  about.  I  advo- 
cate clubbing  a  dog  that  barks  unnecessarily, 
which  all  dogs  do.  I  enjoy  hangings,  particu- 
larly of  converts  to  the  evangelical  faiths.  The 
crunch  of  a  cockroach  is  music  to  my  ears.  But 
when  the  day  comes  to  turn  the  prisoners  of  the 
zoo  out  of  their  cages,  if  it  is  only  to  lead  them 
to  the  swifter,  kinder  knife  of  the  schochet,  I 
shall  be  present  and  rejoicing,  and  if  any  one 
present  thinks  to  suggest  that  it  would  be  a 
good  plan  to  celebrate  the  day  by  shooting  the 
whole  zoo  faculty,  I  shall  have  a  revolver  in  my 
pocket  and  a  sound  eye  in  my  head. 


XXXVII 

ON  HEARING  MOZART 

The  only  permanent  values  in  the  world  are 
truth  and  beauty,  and  of  these  it  is  probable 
that  truth  is  lasting  only  in  so  far  as  it  is  a 
function  and  manifestation  of  beauty — a  pro- 
jection of  feeling  in  terms  of  idea.  The  world 
is  a  charnel  house  of  dead  religions.  Where  are 
all  the  faiths  of  the  middle  ages,  so  complex  and 
yet  so  precise?  But  all  that  was  essential  in 
the  beauty  of  the  middle  ages  still  lives.  .  .  . 

This  is  the  heritage  of  man,  but  not  of  men. 
The  great  majority  of  men  are  not  even  aware 
of  it.  Their  participation  in  the  progress  of 
the  world,  and  even  in  the  history  of  the  world, 
is  infinitely  remote  and  trivial.  They  live  and 
die,  at  bottom,  as  animals  live  and  die.  The 
human  race,  as  a  race,  is  scarcely  cognizant  of 
their  existence;  they  haven't  even  definite  num- 
ber, but  stand  grouped  together  as  #,  the 
quantity  unknown  .  .  .  and  not  worth  knowing. 


86 


XXXVIII 

THE  ROAD  TO  DOUBT 

The  first  effect  of  what  used  to  be  called  nat- 
ural philosophy  is  to  fill  its  devotee  with  won- 
der at  the  marvels  of  God.  This  explains  why 
the  pursuit  of  science,  so  long  as  it  remains 
superficial,  is  not  incompatible  with  the  most 
naive  sort  of  religious  faith.  But  the  moment 
the  student  of  the  sciences  passes  this  stage  of 
childlike  amazement  and  begins  to  investigate 
the  inner  workings  of  natural  phenomena,  he  be- 
gins to  see  how  ineptly  many  of  them  are  man- 
aged, and  so  he  tends  to  pass  from  awe  of  the 
Creator  to  criticism  of  the  Creator,  and  once  he 
has  crossed  that  bridge  he  has  ceased  to  be  a 
believer.  One  finds  plenty  of  neighborhood 
physicians,  amateur  botanists,  high-school 
physics  teachers  and  other  such  quasi-scientists 
in  the  pews  on  Sunday,  but  one  never  sees  a 
Huxley  there,  or  a  Darwin,  or  an  Ehrlich. 


XXXIX 

A  NEW  USE  FOR  CHURCHES 

The  argument  by  design,  it  may  be  granted, 
establishes  a  reasonable  ground  for  accepting 
the  existence  of  God.  It  makes  belief,  at  all 
events,  quite  as  intelligible  as  unbelief.  But 
when  the  theologians  take  their  step  from  the 
existence  of  God  to  the  goodness  of  God  they 
tread  upon  much  less  firm  earth.  How  can  one 
see  any  proof  of  that  goodness  in  the  senseless 
and  intolerable  sufferings  of  man — his  helpless- 
ness, the  brief  and  troubled  span  of  his  life,  the 
inexplicable  disproportion  between  his  deserts 
and  his  rewards,  the  tragedy  of  his  soaring  as- 
piration, the  worse  tragedy  of  his  dumb  ques- 
tioning? Granting  the  existence  of  God,  a  house 
dedicated  to  Him  naturally  follows.  He  is  all- 
important;  it  is  fit  that  man  should  take  some 
notice  of  Him.  But  why  praise  and  flatter  him 
for  his  unspeakable  cruelties?  Why  forget  so 
supinely  His  failures  to  remedy  the  easily  rem- 
ediable? Why,  indeed,  devote  the  churches  ex- 
clusively to  worship?  Why  not  give  them  over, 
now  and  then,  to  justifiable  indignation  meet- 
ings? 

Perhaps  men  will  incline  to  this  idea  later  on. 
It  is  not  inconceivable,  indeed,  that  religion  will 
one  day  cease  to  be  a  poltroonish  acquiescence 
and  become  a  vigorous  and  insistent  criticism. 
If  God  can  hear  a  petition,  what  ground  is  there 
for  holding  that  He  would  not  hear  a  complaint  ? 

88 


It  might,  indeed,  please  Him  to  find  His  creat- 
ures grown  so  self-reliant  and  reflective.  More, 
it  might  even  help  Him  to  get  through  His  in- 
finitely complex  and  difficult  work.  Theology 
has  already  moved  toward  such  notions.  It  has 
abandoned  the  primitive  doctrine  of  God's  arbi- 
trariness and  indifference,  and  substituted  the 
doctrine  that  He  is  willing,  and  even  eager,  to 
hear  the  desires  of  His  creatures — i.  e.,  their 
private  notions,  born  of  experience,  as  to  what 
would  be  best  for  them.  Why  assume  that  those 
notions  would  be  any  the  less  worth  hearing  and 
heeding  if  they  were  cast  in  the  form  of  criti- 
cism, and  even  of  denunciation  ?  Why  hold  that 
the  God  who  can  understand  and  forgive  even 
treason  could  not  understand  and  forgive  re* 
monstrance? 


XL 


THE  ROOT  OF  RELIGION 

The  idea  of  literal  truth  crept  into  religion 
relatively  late:  it  is  the  invention  of  lawyers, 
priests  and  cheese-mongers.  The  idea  of  mys- 
tery long  preceded  it,  and  at  the  heart  of  that 
idea  of  mystery  was  an  idea  of  beauty — that  is, 
an  idea  that  this  or  that  view  of  the  celestial 
and  infernal  process  presented  a  satisfying  pic- 
ture of  form,  rhythm  and  organization.  Once 
this  view  was  adopted  as  satisfying,  its  profes- 
sional interpreters  and  their  dupes  sought  to 
reinforce  it  by  declaring  it  true.  The  same 
flow  of  reasoning  is  familiar  on  lower  planes. 
The  average  man  does  not  get  pleasure  out  of 
an  idea  because  he  thinks  it  is  true;  he  thinks 
it  is  true  because  he  gets  pleasure  out  of  it. 


90 


XLI 

FREE  WILL 

Free  will,  it  appears,  is  still  a  Christian  dog- 
ma. Without  it  the  cruelties  of  God  would 
strain  faith  to  the  breaking-point.  But  outside 
the  fold  it  is  gradually  falling  into  decay.  Such 
men  of  science  as  George  W.  Crile  and  Jacques 
Loeb  have  dealt  it  staggering  blows,  and  among 
laymen  of  inquiring  mind  it  seems  to  be  giving 
way  to  an  apologetic  sort  of  determinism — a 
determinism,  one  may  say,  tempered  by  defec- 
tive observation.  The  late  Mark  Twain,  in  his 
secret  heart,  was  such  a  determinist.  In  his 
"What  Is  Man?"  you  will  find  him  at  his  fare- 
wells to  libertarianism.  The  vast  majority  of 
our  acts,  he  argues,  are  determined,  but  there 
remains  a  residuum  of  free  choices.  Here  we 
stand  free  of  compulsion  and  face  a  pair  or 
more  of  alternatives,  and  are  free  to  go  this 
way  or  that. 

A  pillow  for  free  will  to  fall  upon — but  one 
loaded  with  disconcerting  brickbats.  Where  the 
occupants  of  this  last  trench  of  libertarianism 
err  is  in  their  assumption  that  the  pulls  of  their 
antagonistic  impulses  are  exactly  equal — that 
the  individual  is  absolutely  free  to  choose  which 
one  he  will  yield  to.  Such  freedom,  in  practise, 
is  never  encountered.  When  an  individual  con- 
fronts alternatives,  it  is  not  alone  his  volition 
that  chooses  between  them,  but  also  his  environ- 
ment, his  inherited  prejudices,  his  race,  his 

9i 


color,  his  condition  of  servitude.  I  may  kiss  a 
girl  or  I  may  not  kiss  her,  but  surely  it  would 
be  absurd  to  say  that  I  am,  in  any  true  sense, 
a  free  agent  in  the  matter.  The  world  has  even 
put  my  helplessness  into  a  proverb.  It  says 
tha't  my  decision  and  act  depend  upon  the  time, 
the  place — and  even  to  some  extent,  upon  the 
girl. 

Examples  might  be  multiplied  ad  infinitum.  I 
can  scarcely  remember  performing  a  wholly  vol- 
untary act.  My  whole  life,  as  I  look  back  upon 
it,  seems  to  be  a  long  series  of  inexplicable  ac- 
cidents, not  only  quite  unavoidable,  but  even 
quite  unintelligible.  Its  history  is  the  history  of 
the  reactions  of  my  personality  to  my  environ- 
ment, of  my  behavior  before  external  stimuli. 
I  have  been  no  more  responsible  for  that  per- 
sonality than  I  have  been  for  that  environment. 
To  say  that  I  can  change  the  former  by  a  volun- 
tary effort  is  as  ridiculous  as  to  say  that  I  can 
modify  the  curvature  of  the  lenses  of  my  eyes.  I 
know,  because  I  have  often  tried  to  change  it, 
and  always  failed.  Nevertheless,  it  has  changed. 
I  am  not  the  same  man  I  was  in  the  last  cen- 
tury. But  the  gratifying  improvements  so 
plainly  visible  are  surely  not  to  be  credited  to 
me.  All  of  them  came  from  without — or  from 
unplumbable  and  uncontrollable  depths  within. 

The  more  the  matter  is  examined  the  more  the 

residuum  of  free  will  shrinks  and  shrinks,  until 

in  the  end  it  is  almost  impossible  to  find  it.     A 

great  many  men,  of  course,  looking  at  them- 

92 


selves,  see  it  as  something  very  large ;  they  slap 
their  chests  and  call  themselves  free  agents,  and 
demand  that  God  reward  them  for  their  virtue. 
But  these  fellows  are  simply  idiotic  egoists,  de- 
void of  a  critical  sense.  They  mistake  the  acts 
of  God  for  their  own  acts.  Of  such  sort  are  the 
coxcombs  who  boast  about  wooing  and  winning 
their  wives.  They  are  brothers  to  the  fox  who 
boasted  that  he  had  made  the  hounds  run.  .  .  . 

The  throwing  overboard  of  free  will  is  com- 
monly denounced  on  the  ground  that  it  subverts 
morality  and  makes  of  religion  a  mocking. 
Such  pious  objections,  of  course,  are  foreign  to 
logic,  but  nevertheless  it  may  be  well  to  give 
a  glance  to  this  one.  It  is  based  upon  the  falla- 
cious hypothesis  that  the  determinist  escapes, 
or  hopes  to  escape,  the  consequences  of  his  acts. 
Nothing  could  be  more  untrue.  Consequences 
follow  acts  just  as  relentlessly  if  the  latter  be 
involuntary  as  if  they  be  voluntary.  If  I  rob  a 
bank  of  my  free  choice  or  in  response  to  some 
unfathomable  inner  necessity,  it  is  all  one;  I 
will  go  to  the  same  jail.  Conscripts  in  war  are 
killed  just  as  often  as  volunteers.  Men  who 
are  tracked  down  and  shanghaied  by  their 
wives  have  just  as  hard  a  time  of  it  as  men 
who  walk  fatuously  into  the  trap  by  formally 
proposing. 

Even  on  the  ghostly  side,  determinism  does 
not  do  much  damage  to  theology.  It  is  no  hard- 
er to  believe  that  a  man  will  be  damned  for  his 
involuntary  acts  than  it  is  to  believe  that  he 

93 


will  be  damned  for  his  voluntary  acts,  for  even 
the  supposition  that  he  is  wholly  free  does  not 
dispose  of  the  massive  fact  that  God  made  him 
as  he  is,  and  that  God  could  have  made  him  a 
saint  if  He  had  so  desired.  To  deny  this  is  to 
flout  omnipotence — a  crime  at  which,  as  I  have 
often  said,  I  balk.  But  here  I  begin  to  fear 
that  I  wade  too  far  into  the  hot  waters  of  the 
sacred  sciences,  and  that  I  had  better  retire  be- 
fore I  lose  my  hide.  This  prudent  retirement  is 
purely  deterministic.  I  do  not  ascribe  it  to  my 
own  sagacity ;  I  ascribe  it  wholly  to  that  singu- 
lar kindness  which  fate  always  shows  me.  If  I 
were  free  I'd  probably  keep  on,  and  then  regret 
it  afterward. 


XLII 

QUID  EST  VERITAS? 

All  great  religions,  in  order  to  escape  absurd- 
ity, have  to  admit  a  dilution  of  agnosticism.  It 
is  only  the  savage,  whether  of  the  African  bush 
or  the  American  gospel  tent,  who  pretends  to 
know  the  will  and  intent  of  God  exactly  and 
completely.  "For  who  hath  known  the  mind 
of  the  Lord?"  asked  Paul  of  the  Romans.  "How 
unsearchable  are  his  judgments,  and  his  ways 
past  finding  out!"  "It  is  the  glory  of  God," 
said  Solomon,  "to  conceal  a  thing."  "Clouds 
and  darkness,"  said  David,  "are  around  him." 
"No  man,"  said  the  Preacher,  "can  find  out  the 
work  of  God."  .  .  .  The  difference  between  re- 
ligions is  a  difference  in  their  relative  content  of 
agnosticism.  The  most  satisfying  and  ecstatic 
faith  is  almost  purely  agnostic.  It  trusts  abso- 
lutely without  professing  to  know  at  all. 


95 


XLIII 

THE  DOUBTER'S  REWARD 

Despite  the  common  delusion  to  the  contrary 
the  philosophy  of  doubt  is  far  more  comforting 
than  that  of  hope.  The  doubter  escapes  the 
worst  penalty  of  the  man  of  hope;  he  is  never 
disappointed,  and  hence  never  indignant.  The 
inexplicable  and  irremediable  may  interest  him, 
but  they  do  not  enrage  him,  or,  I  may  add,  fool 
him.  This  immunity  is  worth  all  the  dubious  as- 
surances ever  foisted  upon  man.  It  is  pragmati- 
cally impregnable.  .  .  .  Moreover,  it  makes  for 
tolerance  and  sympathy.  The  doubter  does 
not  hate  his  opponents ;  he  sympathizes  with 
them.  In  the  end,  he  may  even  come  to  sympa- 
thize with  God.  .  .  .  The  old  idea  of  fatherhood 
here  submerges  in  a  new  idea  of  brotherhood. 
God,  too,  is  beset  by  limitations,  difficulties, 
broken  hopes.  Is  it  disconcerting  to  think  of 
Him  thus?  Well,  it  is  any  the  less  disconcert- 
ing to  think  of  Him  as  able  to  ease  and  answer, 
and  yet  failing?  .  .  . 

But  he  that  doubteth — damnatus  est.  At 
once  the  penalty  of  doubt — and  its  proof,  ex- 
cuse and  genesis. 


XLIV 

BEFORE  THE  ALTAR 

A  salient  objection  to  the  prevailing  religious 
ceremonial  lies  in  the  attitudes  of  abasement 
that  it  enforces  upon  the  faithful.  A  man 
would  be  thought  a  slimy  and  knavish  fellow 
if  he  approached  any  human  judge  or  potentate 
in  the  manner  provided  for  approaching  the 
Lord  God.  It  is  an  etiquette  that  involves  loss 
of  self-respect,  and  hence  it  cannot  be  pleas- 
ing to  its  object,  for  one  cannot  think  of  the 
Lord  God  as  sacrificing  decent  feelings  to  mere 
vanity.  This  notion  of  abasement,  like  most 
of  the  other  ideas  that  are  general  in  the  world, 
is  obviously  the  invention  of  small  and  ignoble 
men.  It  is  the  pollution  of  theology  by  the 
sklavmoral. 


XLV 

THE  MASK 

Ritual  is  to  religion  what  the  music  of  an 
opera  is  to  the  libretto:  ostensibly  a  means  of 
interpretation,  but  actually  a  means  of  con- 
cealment. The  Presbyterians  made  the  mistake 
of  keeping  the  doctrine  of  infant  damnation  in 
plain  words.  As  enlightenment  grew  in  the 
world,  intelligence  and  prudery  revolted  against 
it,  and  so  it  had  to  be  abandoned.  Had  it  been 
set  to  music  it  would  have  survived — uncompre- 
hended,  unsuspected  and  unchallenged. 


98 


XLVI 

PIA  VENEZIANI,  POI  CRISTIANI 

I  have  spoken  of  the  possibility  that  God, 
too,  may  suffer  from  a  finite  intelligence,  and 
so  know  the  bitter  sting  of  disappointment  and 
defeat.  Here  I  yielded  something  to  politeness ; 
the  thing  is  not  only  possible,  but  obvious.  Like 
man,  God  is  deceived  by  appearances  and  prob- 
abilities; He  makes  calculations  that  do  not 
work  out;  He  falls  into  specious  assumptions. 
For  example,  He  assumed  that  Adam  and  Eve 
would  obey  the  law  in  the  Garden.  Again,  He 
assumed  that  the  appalling  lesson  of  the  Flood 
would  make  men  better.  Yet  again,  He  as- 
sumed that  men  would  always  put  religion  in 
first  place  among  their_concerns — that  it  would 
be  eternally  possible  to  reach  and  influence 
them  through  it.  This  last  assumption  was  the 
most  erroneous  of  them  all.  The  truth  is  that 
the  generality  of  men  have  long  since  ceased 
to  take  religion  seriously.  When  we  encounter 
one  who  still  does  so,  he  seems  eccentric,  al- 
most feeble-minded — or,  more  commonly,  a 
rogue  who  has  been  deluded  by  his  own  hypoc- 
risy. Even  men  who  are  professionally  relig- 
ious, and  who  thus  have  far  more  incentive  to 
stick  to  religion  than  the  rest  of  us,  nearly 
always  throw  it  overboard  at  the  first  serious 
temptation.  During  the  past  four  years,  for 

99 


example,  Christianity  has  been  in  combat  with 
patriotism  all  over  Christendom.  Which  has 
prevailed?  How  many  gentlemen  of  God,  hav- 
ing to  choose  between  Christ  and  Patrie,  have 
actually  chosen  Christ? 


100 


XLVII 

OFF  AGAIN,  ON  AGAIN 

The  ostensible  object  of  the  Reformation, 
which  lately  reached  its  fourth  centenary,  was 
to  purge  the  Church  of  imbecilities.  That  ob- 
ject was  accomplished;  the  Church  shook  them 
off.  But  imbecilities  make  an  irresistible  appeal 
to  man;  he  inevitably  tries  to  preserve  them  by 
cloaking  them  with  religious  sanctions.  The  re- 
sult is  Protestantism. 


101 


XL  VIII 

THEOLOGY 

The  notion  that  theology  is  a  dull  subject  is 
one  of  the  strangest  delusions  of  a  stupid  and 
uncritical  age.  The  truth  is  that  some  of  the 
most  engrossing  books  ever  written  in  the  world 
are  full  of  it.  For  example,  the  Gospel  accord- 
ing to  St.  Luke.  For  example,  Nietzsche's 
"Der  Antichrist."  For  example,  Mark  Twain's 
"What  Is  Man?",  St.  Augustine's  Confessions, 
Haeckel's  "The  Riddle  of  the  Universe,"  and 
Huxley's  Essays.  How,  indeed,  could  a  thing 
be  dull  that  has  sent  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
men — the  very  best  and  the  very  worst  of  the 
race — to  the  gallows  and  the  stake,  and  made 
and  broken  dynasties,  and  inspired  the  greatest 
of  human  hopes  and  enterprises,  and  embroiled 
whole  continents  in  war?  No,  theology  is  not 
a  soporific.  The  reason  it  so  often  seems  so 
is  that  its  public  exposition  has  chiefly  fallen,  in 
these  later  days,  into  the  hands  of  a  sect  of  in- 
tellectual castrati,  who  begin  by  mistaking  it 
for  a  sub-department  of  etiquette,  and  then 
proceed  to  anoint  it  with  butter,  rose  water  and 
talcum  powder.  Whenever  a  first-rate  intel- 
lect tackles  it,  as  in  the  case  of  Huxley,  or  in 
that  of  Leo  XIII.,  it  at  once  takes  on  all  the 
sinister  fascination  it  had  in  Luther's  day. 


102 


XLIX 

EXEMPLI  GRATIA 

Do  I  let  the  poor  suffer,  and  consign  them,  as 
old  Friedrich  used  to  say,  to  statistics  and  the 
devil?  Well,  so  does  God. 


